SAP BW|BOBJ|Project Management Blog

10 Reasons Why Business Buy-In Beats Change Management [Whitepaper]

Written by Lonnie D. Ayers, PMP | Sun, Mar, 02, 2014 @ 07:50 PM

Have Your SAP Project Achieved Business Buy-In?

SAP BI Projects Have Up To An 50X ROI!

 

Did you know that in a recent Gartner report, 75% of all business intelligence projects are projected to fail and this number is worse than reported by Gartner in all previous reports, going back to at least 2003! In that same article, they reported that successful BI projects have up to a 50X ROI!

 

It's Not the Tools

 

You would think that after all these years of business intelligence projects, the tools would be ‘good enough’.   But if you listen to the BI tools vendors, or just watch their release schedule or pay attention to their buy-outs, then you would have to conclude that by now, the tools must be pretty good, and in some cases, very beautiful to look at.  

 

Achieving Business Buy-In is an Art

 

Want to know a secret?  It doesn’t matter, not one iota. 

What really matters is business buy-in.  

Want to know why?

 

Quick war-story from the way back machine.  In another life, I was an F-16 aircraft maintenance officer.  One of my daily chores was to brief the status of the various parts, such as engines, components, and aircraft, undergoing repair in my shops. 

 

The Daily Meeting

 

This was a very long time ago and the meeting was affectionately known as the daily blood letting.   It essentially consisted of a set deck of charts and graphs, defined by someone in a pay-grade ‘above’ me, but constantly refined by the questions the boss was trying to get answers too.

 

These charts looked just like the charts you get out of excel today, and were displayed on the screen one-at-a-time.  If you were to attend one of these meetings today, the tools would have advanced, no doubt being driven off of a BI like system, but with essentially the same questions being asked and answered.

Business Buy-In Is What Counts

 

In our real life example, it is clear the tools are not the secret sauce of Business Buy-In.   In fact, you could have initiated any number of change management efforts to achieve buy-in, and I am sure this has been done, but unless you truly understood what ‘business buy-in’ actually meant, you might well have been changing to the wrong way of doing things.

 

But what is Business Buy-In? 

 

How does it differ from Change Management? 

 

  1. Business Buy-In means a permanent change in the way a business operates.  

  2. Change Management is the process(s) you use to get Business Buy-In.

 

What are the 10 reasons I believe Business Buy-In is more important than Change Management? I will stick to practical examples from real world situations to make the case.

 

  1. Start with the example of the daily blood letting meeting.  The charts and graphs were what the boss used to ask his questions. 

  2. All levels of the organization had a clearly defined set of questions that everybody worked towards knowing the answer to, everyday, without fail.

  3. Common set of KPIs.  In the example, a key KPI was FMC or Fully Mission Capable. 

  4. It was not acceptable to brief one number but quibble with your own numbers because you didn’t trust the system.  Either you trusted the system or you fixed the system.

  5. The person using the charts and graphs to brief the boss also had to believe the people and systems supplying the numbers were providing ‘true’ information.  In short, there was ‘trust’ up and down the chain-of-command. 

  6. The organization was already designed to work with the ‘numbers’ but also knew to combine the leadership abilities of the people within the organization to discern anomalies in the data.

  7. When ‘holes’ in the picture presented by the data became apparent, the business not only took action to find the answers, everyone was empowered and expected to take action to get the analytics needed.

  8. The definitions (formulas and ratios) of the limited set of KPIs used were well known by all participants in the ‘daily blood letting’ and therefore, everyone was already fully onboard (had bought in) with what they meant and the expected response to whatever they meant. 

  9. The business had an established hierarchy of KPIs, and did not, normally (but could and did if the expected answers were not forthcoming) drill down to the details.

  10. Because of the combination of the limited set of KPIs, an established hierarchy of KPIs and common understanding of both the meaning of KPIs and the expected response to the current operating results as revealed by the KPIs, it was easy for the business to respond in an effective manner to the situation.

Change Management Is Necessary To Business Buy-In But Not Sufficient

Now, many might argue that change management results in all of the above, even business buy-in.  I would say that if that is so, and change management has been employed on those BI projects at the start of this blog, then something isn’t quite right with the approach. 

Change Management is obviously critical to success, but having delivered many, many SAP projects over the years, I believe it is time to focus a bit more on what Business Buy-In actually is before deciding on the change management approach.  That is why I have developed an advanced guide to achieving Business Buy-In which you can get by pressing the button below.

 

 

 

 

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