Accelerate time to value with Inoapps & Oracle Cloud Apps: Part Three

As discussed in our last blog, it's important to start your project with the end in mind, but the key ingredient to achieving any transformation has always been the same—people.

Digital transformation projects are made up of complex, interdependent outcomes that can be difficult to comprehend when looked at as a whole. Like the proverbial elephant, the only way to eat one is piece by piece.

In this blog, we’ll explore the importance of people in your Oracle Cloud Applications transformation, some psychology behind getting the best out of them, and how our Inoapps Evolve approach can support this through incremental optimization.

Evolving the elephant

The simple principle of eating the elephant piece by piece sits at the core of our Inoapps Evolve approach. But instead of consuming, we’re creating. Creating a new operating model and evolving your business incrementally in line with Oracle Modern Best Practice.

We create clearly defined sprints, with achievable outcomes and real-world ROI. The best part about Inoapps Evolve though, isn’t that it’s been designed to help you achieve your strategy and optimize your organization. It’s that it’s designed with your people in mind, to give them control over pace and outcome and space to celebrate their successes.

So who needs to be involved?

With Inoapps Evolve, we align to Oracle Modern Best Practice, which leaves you free to focus on the areas specific to your organization rather than needing to design your processes. While there are many roles required for each project, here are four examples:

Change management
A blog about the importance of people wouldn’t be complete without a recommendation to get the best change expert you can. Your change workstream is where you focus on stakeholder profiling, engagement messaging and training to give your end users the best possible adoption experience.

Test management
Ensuring your project is well received means the quality must be of a high standard. For this, you need a testing workstream led by an experienced test manager to put a robust test plan in place and coordinate test preparation and execution.

Data management
It’s never too early to start preparing and cleaning your data. There’s work to do to eradicate duplicates, write off penny balances or delete unused profiles. Then you need to agree your data migration approach and decide what to migrate. And that’s before you start the ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process. Your data is your second most valuable asset after people, so you’ll need a strong data migration lead to run this workstream.

Analytics
You’ll also need a competent Reporting and Analytics lead to oversee the capture of reporting KPIs at each level of your hierarchy and turn these into reporting specifications. Many of your operational reports will be available within Oracle Cloud, but you may have unique requirements that need to be built out.

Optimum people profile

When choosing the team to support your Oracle Cloud Applications journey, you need people with the right knowledge and experience and the right characteristics. These characteristics include energy, passion, resilience, a desire to implement change and the ability to see how the initiative aligns to business priorities.

If those team members don’t already exist, there’s work to be done to cultivate good mindsets, investing time and energy to explain the human as well as the business journey.

Below we see the typical range of emotions as we navigate an Oracle Cloud implementation. With a major transformation, these emotions are magnified. With Inoapps Evolve, we can compartmentalize and minimize negative impacts by breaking the implementation into bite size chunks, each aligned to a strategic priority.

Avoiding burnout

In a recent Linked In post, Cormac Watters (Executive VP, Oracle), referenced the importance of people energy as part of any Oracle transformation. He identified that many organizations are in a perpetual stage of transformation with largescale initiatives spanning many years. This can lead to project fatigue—particularly for decision makers. For Cormac, the answer is to segment the transformation into bite sized chunks to allow people to reach regular milestones, celebrate and rejuvenate before tackling the next challenge. We agree with you, Cormac, and that’s exactly what Inoapps Evolve is designed to do:

• Understand the big picture
• Design a journey with incrementable benefits
• Accelerate ROI
• Provide the team with the small wins that increase well-being

Ready to receive?

We’ve spoken about the people who are part of the project, but mustn’t forget the other stakeholders who determine success: the end users of your business processes, system analytics and workflows.

They’ll be used to working a certain way, and introducing new ways of working will inevitably disrupt their flow. Here are ways to minimize the impact of this:

• Map out and profile your stakeholder groups.
• Use your business impact assessment to understand the impacts for each group.
• Take time to align with each group, ensuring they’re aware of both the big picture and operational implications.
• Run engagement events to give them space to ask questions and inform them of what’s expected of them.
• Communicate regularly in the run up to go-live and post go-live.
• Understand their learning needs, using your learning needs analysis to structure learning journeys for each group. You’ll need different types of learning journeys, for:
  • Key users heavily involved in the project
  • Professional users like Finance and HR, and
  • Occasional users like employee self-service

Continuous Improvement

Your organization is now ready to evolve. You’ll recall from our last blog in the series that the beauty of Inoapps Evolve is that it's designed to empower continuous improvement, delivering incremental value as you continue your journey.

In our next blog, we’ll look at what you need to think about when developing the roadmap that sets you on your path to continuous improvement.  

To find out how Inoapps Evolve, our accelerated implementation approach, can deliver fast ROI with improved business outcomes, get in touch today.