Cloud migration projects are complex and have inherent risk. Enterprises invest a lot of time and money in migration, as all facets of the enterprise are impacted - from the individual employee, to IT, helpdesk, finance, security, production and more.
Mistakes can get costly, and it’s a classic situation where it’s best to learn from the experience of others.
We at Knoa, provide enterprises with employee user experience management software, which is essential when running a cloud migration project, from helping organizations plan the migration, to avoiding critical mistakes and optimizing processes overall.
In this article we share with you some critical mistakes that are more common than you would expect. Don’t let them happen to you when migrating to the cloud.
Critical mistake #1: Are you really cloud ready?
Mr. B ran a shared service center in India with 2,000 users. The decision was made to move the core CRM and support applications to the cloud. However, some of the third-party systems that were relied upon for plug-ins and datasets were not cloud-ready. When the core solutions were migrated to the cloud, those third party systems failed and made the core solution unworkable.
Lesson Learned #1: Make sure the migration of an application to the cloud includes a mapping of all dependencies of systems not in scope for the migration.
Critical mistake #2: Speed can kill
Mr. A was the program director for one of the tier-one banks when they decided to move to a global cloud application — their first ever solution to migrate to the cloud. The program management office was set up to handle the 20-plus countries in the relevant region. There was a centralized budget that was drawn down by each client country-level project manager and reconciled regionally at a quarterly cadence. Due to the cloud driven speed of deployment, a “rogue” country decided to get all their wish list items put through the change order process, burning up the entire quarters program budget in a single month.
Lesson Learned #2: Understand the cadence at which the business can now operate in a cloud environment and ensure the business processes and governance structures can keep up.
Critical mistake #3: Understand and train the new users
Ms. C works for a global system integrator (SI) that was responsible for the migration to a new cloud based HCM solution for a manufacturing business. In the old system the interaction point was a single page with PDF documents posted to it. The new system was designed to have HR self-service. Training and internal communications were not adequately budgeted, and this became an issue as the number of users that were now supposed to engage through the cloud solution tripled. The new audience did not know what the solution was or how they were supposed to use it; all they knew was that they now didn’t have access to their time off and payroll information. The drop in productivity was not what the project was aiming for, to say the least.
Lesson Learned #3: The people need to be the primary consideration in the People, Process, and Technology implementation model if you are looking for adoption and project success.
Critical mistake #4: Selecting the right delivery partner
Mrs. D selected a tier-one partner for her global engineering operation’s move to a cloud procurement solution. There was an issue in that the budget allocation for the project meant that the pitch team for the project was not involved in the delivery. She ended up with the C team handling her project which led to sub-standard delivery and budget overruns.
Lesson Learned #4: Make sure that you have the right delivery team from the partner on board, not just the right pitch team.
The unifying theme across these four scenarios is the need to have the right data to make confident decisions related to cloud migration projects. Cloud requires a different set of metrics to target in order to deliver success for a business while avoiding some of the mistakes such as those above. Check out our next blog on Metrics for a Meaningful ROI for some of the new ways companies are measuring success.
Critical mistake #5: Don't forget your base
Mr. E used to work in the UK for a large bank that decided to move their infrastructure applications to the cloud to allow the IT and services function to be outsourced to India. It was only after they had completed this move that they realized that all the base systems were running COBOL and, due to the outsourcing, they no longer had any staff who were able to manage the COBOL applications. They ended up having to hire back staff they had let go on very expensive contracts, significantly reducing the ROI of the program.
Lesson Learned #5: The ROI must be feasible operationally as well as from a purely financial spreadsheet perspective.
Why are we telling you all of this?
At Knoa we strive to help companies who are moving ERP systems to the cloud to ensure user adoption, increase employee productivity and business outcomes from their cloud application investments. Click here if you want to learn more.
In a recent eBook, which we invite you to download, we discuss the 5 questions that you should ask before embarking on a cloud migration. Posing these questions prior to embarking on a cloud migration will help you plan and deliver a successful project and transform your business.