One of the most critical items to address before embarking on a CloudSuite implementation is making sure there are procedures in place for scope management. It’s easy to deal with scope creep where there are a lot of little changes to the solution that ultimately impact the success, complexity, and ability to test the system. Much like issue management, scope management has to be identified and resolved at the right levels.
If there are required scope changes, they must be approved at all levels within the organization. Does a functional person believe it's necessary? Does a project manager believe it's necessary? Does the executive committee accept that scope change? When we're talking about scope management, these changes have a material impact to the timeline and cost of the project.
All of these changes are building blocks on one another. The business processes that we want to agree to lead into the scope and the requirements. These are all critical, but so is scope management, and managing both at the same time can be difficult. Having that alignment early on and ideally being able to line up those requirements with your business processes will make it easier to stay on top of everything, which is just another reason you should simplify your business processes ahead of this project. Doing all of this before the project kicks off makes it a lot easier to track everything, especially because you'll never get a PM that knows HR, finance, assets, project ledger, payroll, everything to the nth degree. Instead, we want to make the process as easy as possible while ensuring that the client is getting everything they need.
