Accounting Challenges

The biggest issues came from the lack of availability of the SMEs. Since they were not available or reliable in any way, it was very difficult for the team to get answers to questions to resolve the data reconciliation. The SMEs would not sit and work with the consulting team. This left them working in a vacuum, with no direction. The consulting team would have to take best guesses at certain things and report back to the SMEs when they could.

Physically sitting with or near the implementation team is important to the project’s success as it encourages better knowledge transfer and better communication. In typical IT projects, the IT team gathers requirements and then periodically meets with the finance team sporadically throughout the build. In these cases, the finance team has lost valuable time in terms of learning the system. In almost all cases managed in this way for HFM, the project costs escalate and adoption is poor.