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III: Structuring and Managing the Project

Using Partnerships to Achieve Buy-in

The reality of financial systems in complex organizations today is that they serve many users, and are major tools in accomplishing many important tasks for the institution. As such, any project that will make significant changes in these tools needs continually, throughout the project, to promote a sense of "ownership" of that change across the institution. In addition, as the use and management of information become more decentralized across the institution, there are many different users who have knowledge to contribute to the project. Their expertise can be tapped, and their involvement and buy-in ensured, by creating a series of partnerships through the various additional teams that will be appointed throughout the project, building on the cross-institutional representation of the steering committee and project management team.

Depending on your institution's culture, ideally the chief financial officer (CFO) or chief budget officer (CBO) will enjoy a good working relationship with the chief information technology (IT) officer. The roles of these different players, and the extent to which the CFO/CBO will influence technology decisions, will be determined by the culture of your business/finance group. The financial organization will clearly have a project ownership role, and the project manager may want to encourage the CFO to play a strong role in the technological discussions, as well.

In a situation where the CFO or CBO is involved in the technology strategy, this participation can have significant influence over the strategic direction of the project, particularly in the areas of development philosophy and distributed processing. Based on experience or vision, he or she may incline toward the purchase of applications from outside vendors, or the use of external development alone or in a partnership structure, in an effort to reduce dependence on the information technology organization over the longer term. Alternatively, he or she may prefer an internally developed solution, so that the core financial processes of the organization can continue in as similar a manner as possible to current practice. From the perspective of the CFO, issues such as the ongoing support model for the financial organization, and the process used in developing the business requirements for any technological solution, will be key.

Whatever the particular mix of participation, such a high-level "partnership" between the financial management group and the information technology organization will go a long way toward cementing the change process and marshalling the necessary resources to successfully complete the project. Fostering this particular partnership will also help to avoid a major project land mine -- the failure of technical staff and business staff to agree on the requirements of the specified system.

Without this understanding, the project goals cannot be defined in a way that will be seen as meeting "institutional" needs, since different parts of the institution will be perceiving the needs differently, thus preventing effective evaluation of available tools, setting of project goals and milestones, and clear and consistent definition of needs for vendors (when external solutions are sought). This potential land mine can best be managed by providing as much education as possible for all interested parties on campus, so that the understanding of what already is being done, what changes are to be introduced, and what tools are available to introduce that change are not pieces of information held by only one or two groups, but fashioned by all members of the various teams working together in appropriate partnerships.

Using these partnerships effectively is a key to the success of the project, whether they are between technologists and end users, the chief information technology officer and the CFO, technologists who are focused on client/server-based implementation strategies and those who are more oriented toward mainframe applications, those who benefit from transaction processing systems and those who are more concerned with reporting and manipulation of data, or within staffs of different end-user departments. All of these partnerships will need to be strengthened and refined as the project moves forward.

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