Organizational Skills for ERP

To be effective, employees need a sense of how the organization works and how the actions of each individual affect organizational strategic objectives. Skill in determining the forces and factors that interfere with the organization's ability to accomplish its tasks can help the ERP Consultant become a master problem-solver, an innovator, and a team builder.

Importance of Organizational Skills for ERP Consultants:

While working on ERP Implementations we are trying to solve the organizations biggest problems, we are working to define the processes using which the organization is going to carry out its day to day functions. We are working on shaping the future of the organization by building the IT Capacity for it to steer the growth and able to cope up with the business challenges as they unfold in future. In this context understanding the Organizational Skills and how we can influence and make them effective becomes an important piece of work in the life of any ERP Consultant.

Understanding Organizational Behavior to Derive Change Management:

Organizational effectiveness skills are the building blocks for leadership. Once you understand the dynamics in which organizations operates you can make your ERP implementation process more effective and can derive the change management as you move on, making the organization absorb the changes brought in by the massive ERP Implementations. Proactive approach by an ERP Consultant towards increasing organizational effectiveness skills through training reflects the commitment to shared leadership concepts operating in the organization. Implementing shared leadership values has a positive impact on productivity.

ERP Implementation results in optimizing the business processes, which results in changing the way the people operates in current environment. Each organization has its own culture, own life cycle, own values and beliefs and is characterized by the way people interact in a formal and informal environment. Understanding the Organizational behavior and choosing the appropriate change management and communication techniques to enforce new processes is the key to success of any ERP Implementation. Understanding of these dynamics by the ERP Team improves institutional response time to changing the increasingly complex internal and external environment factors that affect the organization's ability to operate effectively using the new deployed system.

Overcoming ERP Implementation Challenges in Matrix Organizations:

Matrix management is a type of organizational management in which people with similar skills are pooled for work assignments. Most of the big corporations are matrix in nature and generally the business project teams are matrix, constituted with people from different functions, different process areas and different skill sets. For example, all accounting folks may be in one controllership department and report to a finance manager, but during the ERP Implementation these same accounting folks may be assigned to ERP Project team and report to a ERP project manager while the ERP implementation is going on. They still continue to report to their original functions and may still be responsible for some day to day deliverable in their parent organization. Therefore, for the success of the ERP Project the ERP consultant or project manager may have to work with/under several managers to get their job done. Understanding the organizational dynamics under the matrix environment is important for the success of the ERP Project and one of the major challenges for the ERP Project Manager/Consultant is to build synergies in these different teams to accomplish his timelines and deliverables. Influencing others without having any direct authority on anyone in the team becomes the major skill to learn and practice for ERP Consultants.

An effective ERP Consultant must focus on factors and dynamics that will have an impact on the implementation of ERP System in the matrix organization in which the implementation is being planned. He needs to understand that there are going to be wide variety of both factors and dynamics that can influence the implementation of ERP and the constitution of everyday work practices. The successful outcome of the ERP Project is highly dependent on the interaction between organization and project team and during the course of these interactions; the material features of ERP system or organizational behaviors may create or inhibit the chances of success.

Understanding Organization’s Cultural Impact on ERP Implementations:

Several studies have identified critical success factors relevant to ERPs; however cultural fit has been a particularly neglected factor in assessing ERP implementation success. What appears to be important for the success of ERP implementations from the cultural aspect is the understanding of the readiness of the organizations for ERP implementations. Cultural aspects may include clear corporate vision, business plans and goals, established communication channels within the organization and other categories of factors, including change management and team composition, along with willingness to ensure participation from all affected business units to ensure optimum reengineered processes.

Organizational culture plays a critical role in ERP implementation success. Cultural aspects include many other factors apart from societal aspects, like employees response to incentives; identification with the organization, level of satisfaction with work, rigid or flexible hierarchies and structures, amount of paperwork in the organization, influence of political and economic environment, level of accountability, short-term vision and its translation to long term business objectives, performance management, global competitiveness, bureaucracy etc. As it is well noted that ERP demands changes to organizational culture and in this aspect understanding of the influencing factors and bringing flexibility to technological and ERP management aspects can critically affect success.

ERP implementation success is positively related with organizational culture along the dimensions of learning and development, participative decision making, power sharing, support and collaboration, and tolerance for risk and conflicts. Project Managers should take strategic and tactical actions to influence organizational culture and foster a culture conducive to ERP implementation at the very outset of the ERP Project. Although the organizational skills are non-predictive in nature and difficult to accomplish in a short time but understanding the fact that they influence the success of your ERP Implementation and a conscious effort by ERP Consultant to be flexible to these organizational demands can prove to be a turning stone for the success.