What Happens When No One’s Driving the Digital Bus: Why Internal Project Leadership Matters

I recently had a conversation with the IT manager at one of my clients. One of the topics we discussed was how data was structured inside of SAP Concur, the credit card cost management platform they recently deployed. When we looked through the page that users enter information onto while they code a transaction, we found there were a lot of things that were oddly designed. When I say design, this has nothing to do with the technology itself, but how information is organized within the platform. A couple of items stood out:

1. There were two fields with almost identical names
2. There were two dropdown fields that had some identical field entries

Looking at these two items, we surmised that the data structure appeared inherently confusing. Even system administrators felt this way and functional leaders who were meant to use it did not understand it any better.

Without giving you the specific details, the structure was created based on some conceptual ideas of how information should provide insights. This is a good thing. However, it was also created by someone who does not spend a lot of time using the accounting system. The result is that the concept for this data structure does not appear to fully align with what exists in the system.

The implementation of SAP Concur was led by the vendor and the client did not have a project manager to monitor progress and guide the implementation. This means there was no one keeping an eye on how things were going from the side of my client and intervening when obvious improvements could be made. In my opinion, this is something the vendor’s implementation lead should do. However, in my experience, it never happens at any vendor.

I have had this discussion time and time again, and always emphasize how essential it is to assign an internal project manager. I can assure you, if I was leading the project, this situation would not have occurred.

As this company did not assign a digital project manager, they have fallen into old habits and are seeing similar problems occur. While they have completed the implementation, there are aspects of it that are undesirable and will cause frustration for users. This has already led to confusion amongst the user group without any clear pathway to a resolution. I can guarantee you this issue will fester and make adoption slower and less successful.

How did we get to this point? Thinking about the company and its history, we have seen that:

1. The company has never traditionally had a dedicated technology leader to instill the concept of rigorously organized data or effectively manage technology projects.
2. Staff have not had strong digital literacy to the level of thinking about how information ought to be optimally organized. Previous staff most likely had a relatively poor understanding of how the system could support them and instead of looking deeper into it, they just went with something familiar and moved onto the next thing on their to do list.
3. Company leadership has not traditionally focused on the concept of well structured data, so they would not have identified the existence of this problem, much less know how to solve it.

The solution to all of this is very simple and staring us right in the face. If we want a business to have well organized systems that are used to their full extent by all the people in the business, it takes a deliberate effort by a qualified person to make that happen.