Redefining Project Success with CrossVue Complete
By Chad Kainz
Have you ever been involved in an enterprise-scale project that started well but ultimately fell short of expectations once in production? Looking back, did the project:
- Align with the business strategy and people experience goals?
- Involve stakeholders who would experience tangible, day-to-day value after go-live?
- Incorporate operational readiness, production accountability, governance, and user adoption during the transition from deployment into operations?
- Focus on prioritizing business needs or succumb to simply activating product features?
- Foster confidence that the investment in people, processes, and technology could be sustained and grown?
- End up being a lift-and-shift when it set out to be transformative?
While there are many ways to implement enterprise-scale projects, I’ve found that each tends to fall into one of two broad categories:
- Technology-Centric: Expecting technology to drive change, ROI, and business value.
- Transformation-Centric: Using transformation and strategic business value to align technology and attain ROI.
The Problem with Technology-Centric Models
In the latter 20th century, technology-centric models dominated enterprise deployments. The transition from mainframes led to the development of formal methodologies for transitioning custom, home-grown systems and business processes to applications designed to address common needs. The approach of gathering requirements, matching requirements to features, aligning features to technologies, procuring what aligns well, and deploying the amalgam of applications and tools emerged as the default paradigm.
People and processes were expected to adapt to the deployed technology, which logically should return value as the selected technologies met the stated requirements. A technology-centric approach was clean and clear theoretical model backed by established mainframe- and client-server-era practice. Unfortunately, theory and practice don’t always align.
For many organizations, the technology-centric approach fell short. Once the technology was deployed, the transformation ended usually after an incremental improvement was attained.
There can be myriad reasons why transformation stalls in a technology-centric model, but most often there is a thread of disaffected people not perceiving tangible value and in turn, not committing to deeper adoption. This gives rise to shadow processes and regression toward a discernible degree of legacy practice eroding into resurfaced lift-and-shift.
The internet is filled with reflections, stories, and analysis of enterprise system and ERP hardships that tie back to technology-centric thinking in a 21st century world. Typically, the hardships fall into seven themes associated with deployment success:
- Alignment of leadership toward a shared vision and outcomes
- Capacity to drive and complete the project
- Data clarity, consistency, coherence, and quality
- Integrations and their design, complexity, and maintainability
- Experience shaped by process optimization and stakeholder engagement
- Readiness of the organization to transform its approach and operations
- Adoption of change and sustain and grow potential over time
Technology-centric thinking incorporates some form of readiness to connect requirements with product features, charges forward with data and integrations as defined by requirements, deemphasizes the importance of alignment, capacity, and experience, and often bolts on adoption as a documentation and training activity engaging with the project on the periphery.
In my 30+ years of technology leadership and consulting, I wish the pattern wasn’t true, but I’ve seen it play out consistently with the same result: frustrated leaders, stakeholders, and employees who point toward mismatched goals, expectations, and outcomes, and express a dissatisfaction with technology. In time, the dissatisfaction may trigger another search for another technology to solve the same problem, and the cycle starts again.
Shift to Transformation-Centric
Without a doubt, the 21st century is about people elevating their effectiveness by harnessing technology to drive meaningful value both professionally and personally.
At CrossVue, we’ve embraced the seven themes of deployment success. We combine them with contemporary thinking and break the technology-centric cycle. Being transformation-centric recognizes that requirements and technologies are merely facets of a larger, intertwined landscape that provide the context for future potential.
Ultimately, real transformation occurs when leaders and stakeholders connect requirements and technologies to both bigger strategic objectives and tangible what’s-in-it-for-me outcomes.
CrossVue Complete
In 2023, we launched CrossVue Complete (CVC), our holistic way of approaching transformation-centricity within the context of Workday’s prescribed methodologies. Regardless of the scale or scope of a project, the CVC methodology recognizes:
People have expectations of Workday.
People will do things differently in Workday.
People will realize value from Workday.
Every project impacts people.
Every project involves change.
Every project results in transformation.
We are carving out a different and more balanced path to realize future potential for our clients by focusing on the expected and desired outcomes of the project from the very beginning. We contextualize them as the what’s and why’s that shape project success.
As I previously wrote, transformation is not flat; it is a process that evolves as your organization grows in its understanding of its own capabilities and potential as a project unfolds.
The CrossVue Complete Approach in Action
The CVC approach strives to connect envisioned possibilities and priorities to align on a clear view of the future well beyond the first day of production.
It is important to have a clearly defined horizon to serve as a guidepost to keep activity pointed in a direction that aligns with the why behind the project itself. Indicators of value on investment (VOI) are often not seen for several months or up to a year after deployment, so we look to a horizon that is typically three years beyond go-live.
We conduct conversations and workshops with leadership and key stakeholders to understand and contextualize future impact on processes and people, which informs design decisions that shape the technology. Sometimes thought of as strategy, we believe this work should be actionable and connected to project outcomes as they evolve, which is why we weave it throughout the project.
With a clear path in hand, investment in the project involves connecting the aligned vision with the tactical planning that translates requirements into design direction and potential options. Every organization is built around what differentiates it from others, but common business practices exist that transcend businesses, markets, and industries.
Likewise, the prescribed Workday methodologies are table stakes for all partners. The “art of the possible” begins by recognizing that one size doesn’t fit all, using leading practice or methodology as an anchor point for possibility.
In CVC, we work together to use leading practice as our guide and expand upon key areas of importance to realize the potential in the possible. While it is easy to focus on requirements and features, we also gather and analyze impacts on stakeholders, processes, and the organization overall to inform and validate a future state tuned to the business strategy, workforce needs, and organizational culture.
As we implement, we take everything we’ve compiled to date and execute on the plan, adhering to methodology and infusing the decisions and assumptions that make each client’s deployment unique. By starting with leading practices and adhering to priorities and decisions that are aligned to the overall vision, we can keep key success themes around data, integrations, and experience in check.
We can drive successful testing, deployment, and adoption because we’re considering process improvements that enable greater insights from data. This in turn, creates value for stakeholders and employees to encourage greater adoption because we’ve understood potential impacts on people. Then, we put into place change strategies and tools to mitigate deployment risk.
In parallel, we draw upon the implementation to guide readiness activities so the transition from deployment to production goes as expected. We also focus on putting processes in place to support service delivery, production governance, and Workday’s day-to-day operations.
A significant factor behind readiness and adoption success centers on how these activities are embedded within the organizational culture and operational support model for an organization’s people.
Nurturing lasting value depends on the ability of the organization to support its people and Workday itself. While some organizations can make use of generic checklists and templates to support change efforts, with CVC we place a significant emphasis on tailoring adoption activities, documentation, and training to an organization’s people and learning culture.
Because perceived success or failure hinges on ongoing workforce adoption and trust in Workday, aligning change and post production support with the desired employee support experience is key.
The structure and mechanisms that underpin everything from day-to-day break-fix to triaging and escalating issues to subject matter specialists, to making configuration decisions and regression testing of production changes are incorporated into our CVC approach. This extends well beyond the baseline recommended by Workday and incorporates our post production services (PPS).
Sustainable Transformation and Lasting Value
All in all, our CVC approach is holistic and strives to look over the horizon to ultimately realize value in an organization’s investment in people, process, and technology.
- It isn’t centered on a small team — it reflects how we work together.
- It isn’t a project stage — it is a continuous effort that starts before project planning and extends well beyond go-live.
- It isn’t one-size-fits-all — it can be tailored to what your organization needs.
- It isn’t a bolt-on — it is embedded into our way of engaging with clients.
Most importantly, CVC can be applied to any methodology, whether prescribed by Workday or used with other methodologies such as Agile or People-Centered Design.
By being transformation-centric, CVC is holistic and centers on outcomes driven by multiple inputs that need to demonstrate value to people. It is a living approach that we continuously improve and iterate to adapt to the changing needs of our clients.
Contact us to learn more about how we can help your organization focus on the future, create possibilities, and realize lasting value from your investment.
