Written by Greg Gillet of Wolters Kluwer: We have high expectations of technology: according to Deloitte research, 67% of CIOs expect IT to deliver increased efficiency and reduced costs and 70% expect it to deliver business process improvements.
The implementation of new software in your accountancy practice has to be the best it can be to achieve these challenging targets. Follow these seven best practices to give your next technology project its greatest chance of success.
1. Get early involvement
You can’t please everyone, but you can encourage a wider sense of ownership by involving your team as much as possible.
Even if final decisions are taken by senior managers and partners, look for ways your staff can make a genuine contribution to the process. Could they help frame the questions that need to be addressed? Or determine the criteria against which contenders will be measured? Or help set project priorities?
2. Spell out the benefits
Be specific and be personal so everyone understands what they, personally, will get out of the change. So what if the software makes it easier to prepare tax returns? What matters to most people is that their own working lives in December and January will be less fraught!
Even more general benefits to the practice will, ultimately, bring benefits to the staff, such as greater business stability, opportunities for more interesting and challenging work, and enhanced career prospects. It’s worth spelling these out.
3. Find a champion (or several)
Project managers can’t be everywhere at once! You need to enlist the help of some project champions.
Champions have to be fully behind the project. They need to really understand the advantages of the new software solution and the intended outcomes of the project. They work with stakeholders to keep them engaged and happy with the process, combatting the inevitable “project fatigue” that affects many projects, particularly longer ones.
4. Keep communicating!
Good project management relies on effective communication, not just at the launch and end of the project, but at every stage.
Rumours and negativity can spread quickly – regular, open and honest communication will help you to overcome these. Find milestones along the way that you can mark and celebrate, but be honest about any challenges and delays, too. This will help to avoid unexpected shocks later on.
5. Provide a range of training resources
Training is vital to project success. It’s not enough to simply launch a new software system, you have to make sure that people are using it, and using it efficiently.
These days it’s relatively easy to generate material in different formats to suit different learning styles: physical documents and printed guides; simple FAQs; pages on your intranet; demo data for those who learn best by using the software; classroom training; live, online webinars and recorded videos.
6. Evaluate the project
Many software projects aren’t evaluated until they’re finished, by which time it’s usually too late to change outcomes.
Instead, break the project down into manageable chunks and evaluate each phase as it’s completed. There are lots of ways of gathering evaluation data, formally and informally, from face-to-face debriefs, “lunch and learn” sessions, a quick email, a form on the firm’s intranet or an online survey.
7 . Don’t forget new starters!
Of course it’s important to train your current team, but don’t forget training for new staff so that everyone adopts best practice.
Make sure you build sufficient training into your induction programme, but remember that “training” doesn’t mean leaving someone alone in a room for a day and hoping they’ll emerge as a fully-fledged expert in the software. If you followed the suggestions in step 5 above, you’ll already have training material in a variety of formats to help different people learn in the way that suits them.
Greg Gillet is communications manager at Wolters Kluwer. The group will be at Accountex Summit North, Pod 35.