I had a particularly memorable lunch with the CIO of one of our previous clients, where the discussion largely involved the idea of how to create the perfect IT team structure.
He was curious about my thoughts on the best organizational structure to support the business transformation plan we had recently put together.
The plan called for a consolidation of systems into a single instance ERP system that was designed to support several of their companies.
Defining Your IT Team Structure
When working with a multi-plant, multi-company ERP system, there are a large number of integration points between companies or locations. The amount of organizational change management that goes into altering the scope of the planned systems is substantial. Through the course of the conversation we defined the areas an IT team structure would need to address, which included the following operations:
- Program Management
- Functional
- Technical
- Data
Program Management Team
The Program Management Office (PMO) will be a cross-functional ERP project management team. This functional group should include the CIO, along with other key executives from each of the companies. This team will constantly review progress along the defined transformation roadmap and adjust priorities based on defined ROI, risk, and pre-requisite parameters.
In the early stages of the project, this team must be heavily involved in the following areas:
- Defining the business case
- Identifying vulnerabilities
- Evaluating the feasibility of each class of software involved in the transformation
- Assessing the scope of organizational change
- Completing a stakeholder assessment
The CIO in partnership with the Ultra Senior Manager should serve a key facilitation role during the PMO meetings.
Functional Team
The Functional team should consist of the following resources:
- Business process owners
- IT business analysts
- ERP functional consultants
Like many rapidly growing mid-size enterprises, the company in question was struggling to fully back-fill their key process owners. To compensate, it is important to establish IT Business Analysts that will be aligned with each process owner.
They will assist with system documentation, development of training materials and will become proficient in the parts of the software applicable to their scope of support. This will include screen tailoring.
The IT Analysts will develop specifications for required enhancements and report development. During their ramp-up, the Ultra functional consultants and change manager will provide additional support. The IT Business Analysts will then take the lead on user training and assume functional support concurrent with go-live.
Technical Team
The Technical Team will consist of an IT Technology Manager overseeing sub-teams focused on the following areas:
- Network Architecture
- ERP Software Deployment
- Report Development
- Interface Development
- Enhancement Management
- System Integration
- ERP Data Conversion
- User Security, and more
Ultra’s technology resources will then partner with the client IT Technology Manager to ensure proper architecture decisions are in place, and clear responsibilities and accountability have been defined among the various technology partners in play.
Data Team
The Data Team will consist of data analysts and a database administrator. The consolidation of the systems will require a major rationalization of the de-normalized master files with heavy Extract Transformation Load (ETL) work.
The data analysts will identify the sources of the key legacy master data and catalog the data elements of each file. In partnership with the ERP functional consultants, the data analysts will identify the target formats for the tables and write ETL specifications for the technical team.
IT Team Structure Resources
Ultra has helped several of our clients to properly structure an IT team with great success.Contact us today to learn more.
In addition, you may refer to our white paper “IT Project Governance for Manufacturing Organizations” for further insight on the subject.
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