Case Study for Stakeholders Analysis On-Line Course

You were just promoted from Developer to Field Engineer at a mid-size software company
called ERP Solutions, Inc. Your company sells enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to
small and medium sized businesses.

It’s a good day for both you and ERP Solutions. For the past year you’ve been working in a
cubicle doing mostly development, and you’ve been itching to get out of the office and spend
more time in the field. Your sales team has just landed a new customer, and they asked you to
lead the implementation. It’s a big career step, but you’re excited about the new challenge. The
Sales Director told you, “This client might be tricky – There are a lot of competing interests, but
as long as you understand them, you’ll be fine.”

Here’s the description you got from the Sales Team:

“SA & Associates (your new client) is a consulting firm. They have worked primarily as a
strategy and advisory firm, but recently they added implementation work for a variety of areas
and their management systems aren’t designed for this kind of work. In the past 18 months,
they’ve grown from 20 people to 50 full time employees, plus another 100 contract consultants
who work on an as-needed basis. In short, they’ve outgrown their management system and need
an ERP system.

“SA&A is currently managed by spreadsheet. This hodge-podge of disjointed systems worked

for a 20 person firm, but the senior management is getting frustrated by the lack of detail and
inability to plan. It’s making a mess of operations. Every project manager (PM) has his own set
of spreadsheets, and each project is managed differently. The PMs say they manage based on
what the clients want, but in reality, the PMs use what they learned at their previous jobs. The
current system no longer serves the needs of our customer – They really need our ERP Solution.

“We sold this engagement based on these pain points:

 The current hodge-podge doesn’t allow leadership to plan ahead. Some project
managers regularly report percent complete, but these measures are quite subjective and
project teams are not held to their schedules. The reality is they only track “days
worked,” and they each have a different definition of what constitutes a day.
 SA&A’s clients prefer to work on actuals for T&L (travel and lodging,) and that works
great as a simple flow-through. However, some clients prefer to pay them a flat rate for
T&L, and that causes a lot of accounting issues.
 All the expenses are manually copied from the home-grown project tracking master
spreadsheet (We think it’s an MS-Access file, but we’re not sure.) to the accounting
software. This process is very time consuming, very inefficient and very prone to errors.
 With the poor forecasting, they can’t schedule training. They want to train the 100 or so
contract employees, but figuring out when they roll off projects and when they’re
available has become a big mess.

Copyright © Communication for Geeks, 2016 @WeTeachGeeks

  We were able to quantify the problem:
o Cost: The inefficiency costs at least as much as three full time finance /
accounting employees.
o Compliance: With all the manual data entry, SA & Associates is in great danger
of misreporting its earnings and getting audited. We know that the owners want
to be acquired by one of the big consulting firms, and screwed-up accounting
could derail the whole thing.
o Growth: The owners feel they can’t grow anymore. They eventually want to
cash-out, but until they get this situation under control, they can’t.

“We might have a problem convincing the SA&A field staff that they need to do this upgrade.
The PMs are stereotype client-facing folks. They don’t know – or care – what’s going on at the
home office, but they will be the first to complain if they can’t get the people they want, or they
have to use a new system. The PMs are quite good at expanding client engagements. They more
than anyone else are driving the growth of the company, but it’s rapidly becoming
unmanageable.”

You feel pretty good about your ability to help. SA&A is typical of your customers, so you have
many examples and case studies to review before you get started. You know that there are a lot
of competing interests, many of which can screw up the implementation. One of the veteran
Field Engineers recommended you do a stakeholders analysis very early in the process…

…but how do you do that?

Copyright © Communication for Geeks, 2016 @WeTeachGeeks