08/27/2014
Post LMS Go-Live – A Customer’s Pain!
by Maryann Ford, Senior hyperCision Consultant
Congratulations! You’ve signed the SOW. It’s now a reality – the implementation of a new learning solution moves forward. Planning has begun – you’ve assembled your team, the time line is in place, the passion and the commitment is there!
In the years I’ve worked with software solutions, the go-live time is both exciting and challenging. It’s the road to sustainability, delivering dynamic training and development to employees, meeting the needs of your workforce and attaining business goals. All the hard work is in the past. Right?
But what happens “post” go-live. Yes, the “pain points”. I have had the opportunity to talk with customers about their go-live challenges. Here are some of the most common:
Expectations – you are told the system can do many things – some are tested. But until you actually start using the system, you may not realize the application does not meet all requirements.
Inadequate Requirements – getting additional funding can be a challenging process depending on how long the funding cycle is. If requirements are wrong or if go-live finds a “bug”, you may have to live with the system “as is” until funding is approved.
Adoption Utilization – project teams disband, leadership changes, vendors move on – resulting in a loss of knowledge, experience, resources and continuity. Unless you have a mechanism(s) in place to drive utilization, you will not be able to leverage all the potential of the system.
Lack of Documentation – the questions! How come it was done this way? Who made this decision? Why was the process changed? Where is the documentation? There is no detailed account of what was done, why, who, how and when.
Transition to Support - external support and internal – long turn-around times, managing performance, outages, bugs, resolving end-user issues impact your user population, day-to-day business and revenue.
Reporting - data in the system is only useful if it can be easily turned into information to meet any number of requirements – many identified after go-live. People tasked with capturing and pulling data typically have no underlying knowledge about using the right tools to maximize reporting capabilities.
Data Cleanup – the system is not “broken” - poor data quality makes it such that normal business operations cannot be conducted.
Scalability – inability to leverage system(s) requirements to handle growing amounts of work and data to accommodate growth.
Quantifying Return on Investment – how to best measure success.
In part 2 of this blog, our Practice Director, Sharon Cook, will talk describe how hyperCision uses system healthchecks to support customers post-go-live.
