Insights | Cases

Cost reductions and increased likelihood of success.

Client

Insurance

Challenge

The client was at the final development stage of a new global, multimillion-euro ERP solution. The client was concerned that the future end users seemed to have disengaged themselves from the process and were no longer attending feedback sessions regarding workflows, screen layouts, and features. This posed a significant risk that the upcoming release would not meet the business needs and generate the expected value, and that the company would face costly rework after the release. Due to constraints related to external contractors, the solution could not change the project organization, introduce new governance elements, or in any way pause or delay the project.

Solution

The solution was to transition from a comment-based to a criteria-based feedback model. Initially, the team employed a traditional comment-based approach, where end users were shown new features and asked to provide comments. At the outset of the project, end users actively participated and provided numerous comments. However, most of these comments turned out to be non-critical and were never utilized. Consequently, the developers reached the conclusion that end user insights were insignificant, and the end users themselves felt that their input was not valued.

To address this challenge, the client implemented a criteria-based feedback model. Going forward, end users were asked to assess criteria related to the daily use and value of new workflows, screen layouts, and features. This facilitated concise feedback from end users, which proved to be useful and easy to process and prioritize for the developers. As a result, a greater volume of critical feedback was collected and utilized to enhance the solution prior to its release. Moreover, the new approach fostered transparency and helped align expectations among development teams, end users, project managers, and business managers.

Benefits

Cost reductions through early intervention.

Increased likelihood of success for the new ERP solution.

Improved collaboration and transparency.