Know-How Exchange : Strategy

Transition seems it would be all the items needed to move the old data to the new system.

Implementation suggests programming, deploying, and training users.

Well I’m with the punk – and I think that Chris has got the situation back-to-front.

I also think that the entire project smacks of terminological bullshit from someone who wants to demonstrate that he’s remembered the vocabulary from his MBA course – but maybe I’m being unnecessarily cruel there.

A transition plan implies stating how you are going to move from one software system, already implemented where there is an assumption that you know where you are with it. In other words, someone has analysed your current status in order to justify moving to a new system. I’m afraid to say that in my experience (945 CRM clients) very few actually know where they are or what they are doing at the moment. They sometimes have an idea of what they think they ought to be doing and have a vague idea about what they’d like to be doing – hence the new system.

A transition plan implies that you are going to move from an old known to a knew, defined as yet untried known which is, to paraphrase Mr Rumsfeld either a known unknown or an unknown known. You can’t have a transition plan without an implementation plan, so I see the implementation plan as the sub-set of the transition plan. Only with more technical detail.

Implementation to us is largely mechanics training and support. Transition is the organisation of the whole caboodle from existing system, rules, training and data through to new system, new rules, new formats of data and newly trained staff. The transition plan implies that there has to be an implementation plan because you can’t have the transition plan without implementing something to transition to!

What would pleasantly surprise me would be if you actually know what you are transiting from. Most implementations fail because they make implicit assumptions about the mechanisms which are currently deployed. Thus when the shiny new ones are implemented, you are moving from something that doesn’t in reality exist to something which you think you want to exist.

I’d write the implementation plan and then expand the front-end and the back-end to ensure that you define the “from” and the “to” states. That neatly covers your ass when the thing doesn’t work because no one has defined “How we do things now” very accurately. In fact, you might pre-empt this typical failing and propel your company into the 19% who manage to get it right.

Unfortunately, if you do so, someone else will probably take the credit!

Steve Alker
Unimax Solution