Get to know 8 core cloud team roles and responsibilities

There are many benefits to implementation planning, with the top benefit being an increased chance of project success. Implementing a project plan creates a roadmap for executing your project so you can prevent issues from occurring. Probably not, because nailing pieces of wood together without a plan could lead to disaster.

An ERP system can eliminate many paper- or spreadsheet-based processes because it provides a unified set of business process tools and a single database with information from across the business that everyone uses. Without a doubt, the project manager is the most fundamental project management role, as he or she guides the team through the project life cycle through thoughtful decision-making. As stated above, project managers are in charge of creating a project plan, leading project team members, monitoring the project health and overseeing the creation of project management documentation.

And finally, the project team’s communication, while a less direct measure, is another indicator of achievement. How well did the team communicate project status to the company at large and up the chain to department managers and company executives? Your team’s structure impacts everything from team building to employee morale and even business success. As a project manager, creating clear boundaries between different teams can help improve productivity and performance. Unlike the triangular shape of a traditional org structure, a flat structure is an interconnected web with multiple flat levels.

How to structure your change implementation team

Outlining the deliverables you hope to create can serve as a resource when managing time frames, delegating tasks, and allocating resources. Their degree of involvement depends on the complexity and security needs of your internal system, as well as the level of software compliance. Sometimes the integration is straightforward and involves just a simple modification of code.

A project implementation plan sometimes includes a rough schedule, but teams usually set the hard timeline in the execution plan. With the essential roles covered, set up project management software to speed up daily operations and provide for more transparency of the project processes, as well as establish productive communication. The change management team is a critical intermediary in the ERP implementation process. The project manager oversees the ERP implementation process to make sure that is it on schedule and meeting the goals of the organization. This can include the internal project manager, the implementation partner project manager, and a site manager. Building a cross-functional team ensures cohesion in the ERP implementation process.

Follow a structured and inclusive implementation planning process

The extent to which organisations and individuals are both ‘willing’ to, and ‘capable’ of, implementing any specific intervention. The carrying out of planned, intentional activities that aim to turn evidence and ideas into policies and practices that work for people in the real world. Practices, programmes, policies, strategies or other activities that have been empirically shown through scientific research and evaluation processes to improve outcomes to some degree. Using processes for collecting and analysing different types of data to guide decisions with the aim of improving outcomes on an ongoing basis. The set of circumstances or unique factors in which implementation takes place.

In Part One of this series on change implementation teams, I reviewed factors related to the team’s mandate, as well as the skills and perspectives that should be considered when staffing the team. In Part Two, I offer some ideas about how to structure your implementation team. Select a project manager to oversee the entire project, and designate a project owner to take responsibility for the success of the project. Super-users are individuals who receive in-depth training to fully understand the features and functions of the ERP software. Smaller organizations may have a single super user who learns the new processes for each department.

• If you can plan out what resources you need for your project and ensure those resources will be available, you’ll avoid the risk of running out of resources mid-project.
• Their main responsibility is to approve or reject any potential changes to the project plan, which is of great importance in project management as unexpected changes can lead to project failure.
• Scheduling your project milestones is an important step in the planning process because these checkpoints help you track your progress during execution.
• This tends to work for teams that want to ensure decision making authority isn’t limited to a handful of individuals, and rather, want team members to feel empowered to make decisions.
• They are different in that they are actively involved in overseeing and managing the implementation process.
• That way, others involved in the project can look through your findings and potentially help you prevent these risks.
• A top-level champion will be valuable in rallying the rest of the organization behind an ERP implementation.

One team member may be responsible for overseeing the project review, while you may assign three other team members to handle the delivery and communication of the project to various teams for review. When you assign responsibilities and tasks, be sure to make your expectations clear. The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed. You can use a PERT chart to forecast project duration by creating a timeline for individual tasks and identifying dependent tasks.

Building a Successful ERP Implementation Team

PS consultants are responsible for supporting their sales teams with opportunities that may be more complex or may involve more customization to the typical user or client. The SaaS concept revolves around provisioning software to users via licenses and/or a subscription plan. If you lease or provide your software to users via a cloud-based system, you are a SaaS company. Discover how Avantiico helps you improve business processes, provide customers with a seamless experience and transform the way you do business. Scheduling your project milestones is an important step in the planning process because these checkpoints help you track your progress during execution. Milestones serve as metrics—they are a way to measure how far you’ve come in your project and how far you have left to go.

This requires engineers to possess detailed knowledge of a cloud’s operation and be able to set up and configure resources, including servers, storage, networks and an array of cloud services. At a daily operations level, too, one can miss opportunities due to poorly thought-out staffing decisions. A project manager may, for instance, overlook the need for a DevOps engineer, thus, preventing themselves from tapping into numerous benefits. For example, in one of our projects, introducing DevOps helped our customer reduce release cycles from ten to two weeks, implement 30+ new features quickly, and achieve a code coverage of 80%. Below, we answer all of the essential questions related to setting up a product development team that would make your project a success. Whether you opt for Waterfall or Agile development directly impacts your workflows and the team composition.

As a project manager, working on the project implementation plan while you are also working on the strategic plan can help minimize the total time spent on planning. Although the project timeline may change as your project progresses, it’s important to clarify your expected due dates during implementation planning. When you estimate task due dates, you can schedule milestones around these due dates and plan for project completion. You will commonly see Gantt charts used for strategic planning and implementation planning. This is because Gantt charts display information in a follows a linear path, similar to a timeline.

Implementation

Studies investigating change efforts with and without such teams have found that those with change teams can more efficiently and effectively embed change in an organization. Given that, establishing a team of people responsible for the change implementation’s success seems pretty important. Often organizations will engage with a specialized ERP implementation partner to help them with their ERP implementation. For larger projects these companies will provide a team of dedicated consultants to work on the project and they may include technical, functional and project management resources.

The end-users are a team of internal employees brought in to represent the different departments in the business. They will champion the use of the ERP system throughout the business and help drive user adoption post-implementation. The direction in which the implementation goes is ultimately up to the project owner, even if they aren’t directly involved in the actual implementation. You need a calm thinker, as they’ll be relied on to solve unforeseen issues that arise.

Benefits of having an implementation plan

Still, there are organizational leaders, like a Scrum Master in Scrum or a Service Delivery Manager in Kanban. Spanning a maximum of nine to ten people, Agile teams allow a certain degree of autonomy, so the team members have the freedom to prioritize their workloads and shape their workflows the way they want. These include the type and complexity of your software product, the time you have implementation team structure to deliver the product, and the allocated budget. If the organization does not use the ERP vendor’s services team or a third-party partner to lead the implementation, the IT team member will also represent the internal IT staff responsible for getting the system live. That includes configuring the software to the business’s needs, whether it’s a cloud ERP or on-premises ERP solution.

“Implementation planning often gets derailed due to the input from various people that are not involved in the project,” he says. “There needs to be a clear line between the implementation team who is responsible for the execution and final project completion and the customers, internal or external, who are the recipients of the project. The customers can outline their requirements, but the implementation, tasks, and deliverables should be guided by the implementation team,” he concludes. Given that organizational change efforts are often long-term — lasting 1-3 years — the ideal of stability of individuals on the team may seem hard to attain.

Let’s look at how the generic structure discussed in the previous section comes to life in various real-world situations. Specifically, we’ll look at teams involved in an ERP implementation, a process improvement effort, and a system-wide strategy implementation. Relatedly, the boundaries and linkages between the implementation team, the governance structure and stakeholders should be clear. This can help to specify the accountability and responsibilities of the implementation team, , and can ensure team members don’t lose sight of the context in which they are working. Some organizations may also require a report writer for a successful ERP deployment.

Assembling a Project Team: Roles, Responsibilities & Best Practices

Clarifying the team’s mandate, as well as staffing and structuring it appropriately will put your team in a great position to begin its work. Beyond that, implementation teams benefit from good practices that support high-performing teams in general. Things like establishing clear processes and norms to support cooperation, communication, and coordination, among others. For more on successful team practices that can benefit your implementation team, I invite you to explore my posts on teamwork here and here. To oversee the implementation of an Enterprise Resource Planning system, a luxury car manufacturer created an implementation team driven by its IT department, but also encompassing other business units. The IT department reported to the broader management team of the organization.

The report writer is responsible for analyzing existing report procedures and implementing new report procedures using the selected ERP system. In some cases, the duties of the report writer are handled by a super user or members of the IT department. The Project Manager may be a full-time employee of the organization or they may be an employee of the implementation partner. Alternatively they may instead be an external contractor not connected to either the organization or the implementation partner. The typical responsibilities of the committee are simply handled by executives at the highest level in the company’s organizational chain. An oversight committee or steering committee is used to oversee the overall implementation process.

Product-focused divisional structure

Overview & benefits Learn why customers choose Smartsheet to empower teams to rapidly build no-code solutions, align across the entire enterprise, and move with agility to launch everyone’s best ideas at scale. Linux admins can use Cockpit to view Linux logs, monitor server performance and manage users. While cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, cloud users are responsible for security in the cloud. The skills, knowledge and actions needed to complete each of these project examples vary widely.