The next item goes back to our employees, which is dedicating key employees to the project.
What we mean by that is that we want the best people, the most knowledgeable people within each of the process areas to be assigned to the project and dedication is important in the sense that you want to be able to try to backfill or back up these individuals. You want to try to pull them out of their daily jobs and have them focus on the project itself. It's incredibly important that the people that are key in all areas, from the project manager to the functional business owners to the technologists, it's important that they're dedicated with the right amount of time such that the project isn't delayed or that there aren't issues with getting activities completed on time.
In my experience, these key employees, they are there from the onset and then they become your trainers. They become the people who are empowering the rest of the organization and really inspiring them and bringing them along, sometimes pulling them along into this implementation. It's incredibly important to get that buy-in with specific employees early on.
Another important characteristics of a successful implementation that centers around people, is creating an environment of empowerment. You want to allow your resources assigned to the project to fully engage and make decisions at the appropriate level, so that your operational functional people are making functional decisions and your steering committee members are making department-wide enterprise-wide decisions. It's very important to empower individuals and the way you do that is through roles and responsibilities, having clearly defined roles, clearly defined responsibilities, and it helps the project team understand where they can make decisions or where they need to escalate them.
I think that's probably one of the most important pieces on the project is ensuring that empowerment throughout.
