How To Accelerate Business Application Implementations

In today’s Business Application Implementation world there are many challenges that organisations have to consider. Issues like user adoption, licensing, Total Cost of Ownership (TOC), Return on Investment (ROI), product roadmap, and many others.  

However, in our rapidly changing and borderless digital world, one of the biggest challenges we all are facing is the shortage of skills, specifically at the specialist level. These skilled broad thinking implementation gurus keep the glue together to drive successful business application implementations across your organisation. However, they are often bogged down with endless workshops and discussions to understand the requirements, fit gaps and design solutions.  

The Challenge: Maximising Capacity and Consistency  

An issue presented, is the pressure on implementation teams to accelerate due to pressure on costs and business demands. The teams take shortcuts and are not consistent in terms of the delivery approach and the artifacts that they produce are substandard, potentially requiring the specialist to redo work or spend time on checking the outputs.  

Time is always an issue, access to business stakeholders, process owners and users, especially where implementations span multiple time zones and languages – getting time to workshop and discuss processes and requirements, can be very lengthy and often cause massive overrun on time and budget.  

The Solution: Accelerate Business Application Implementations to Improve TCO and ROI? 

The key to solving these challenges lies in the digital transformation of the implementation processes. Using tools to help implementation teams accelerate and automate the analysis and design of the business applications. To achieve this, you can do the following:  

• Build Partnerships  

We at Mint Group UK have partnered with leading implementation specialists who have produced a client-facing discovery and design template, spanning across many business requirements that align to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform offerings. These templates can be configured to address specific industries or applications.  

• Prioritise Data-Driven Integration   

We can fast-track engagement with clients as they provide the input to the business application template with our guidance. The data is then collated and presented back to the client showing a clear fit-gap analysis, licensing requirements, and blueprint of requirements. This approach allows us to maximise our skills capacity as it requires less workshopping and exploration. The templates also drive consistency in the approach and improve the quality of the artifacts as completeness is dependent on the template being filled. 

• Use Customisable Templates  

Using customisable templates allows organisations to be flexible. They can be completed by the client in advance and reviewed by the implementation team in their language and time zone.  

The discovery phase then talks to the design phase, and nothing is lost in translation, a similar approach is undertaken and once the templates are completed, there is a clear understanding of how the business application solution needs to be implemented, detailing everything down to entities, attributes, processes, data migration, and integration. 

These business application implementation templates can span many different areas of the business or be very specific to one output.  

• Strive For Continuous Improvement  

Implementation is not a once-off effort and will require some work. This means it must evolve to support new business demands and technology. Following deployment, you will need to continue managing the project- picking up on issues and in turn, supporting rising business requirements. To achieve this, a review and assessment should be completed, to ensure that the implementation is valuable and still meets the organisation’s needs.  

Conclusion 

Organisations often underestimate the time, budget, and consistency needed for a successful implementation. Developing a concise blueprint from the onset can assist you in resolving some of these challenges and simplify the decision-making process.  

Maximising the efficiency of your talent pool is critical, consistent quality output is key, and fast-tracking your implementations, drives better ROI – this is a winning formula.