How to Assess the Impact of Your Procure to Pay Project

Given the size of the investment and the strategic importance of finance and procurement transformation projects succeeding, the margin for error and failure is getting smaller and smaller. To effectively mitigate against the risks that procure to pay solution projects introduce its important to look at both the human side of the change and the human side of the success. Identifying all the risks that may arise from those changes and mitigating them as best they can.

Depending on the existing culture and structure of your organisation your approach will need to be different. For smaller organisations with a much flatter structure your approach to mitigating the human impact will likely be less formal. Whereas if you are in a very established business with a very hierarchical structure your approach will likely be more formal.

Equally you should also be considering the depth of the change within your organisation. For example if the transformation involves, in parallel, people and processes changes along with a new platform than you will need to have a far more in depth change management approach to lift up the capability within your organisation.

A Change management framework is the perfect tool to plan for this. Depending on the level of Change maturity at the organisation, a 3 or 5 step change model for the change journey can be implemented.  The Prosci ADKAR model is the most commonly used which develops the change through Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforce phases.

Step 1 – Assess the Impact

• List out key stakeholders both internal and external
• Identify the impact of the change for each stakeholder
• Rank the size of the impact and the disruption it would cause
• Understand current pain points

Step 2 – Identify Transformation Wins

• Map current pain points to expected benefits to identify the transformation wins for each group
• Identify transformation champions across the stakeholder groups to promote the wins

Step 3 – Identify Mitigation Activities

• For each of the stakeholder groups identify what mitigation activities are required to ease the transition for these groups
• Assign owners to each of the mitigation activities

Step 4 – Monitor and Track Progress

• Ensure you have clear metrics and check points in place to monitor your progress and course correct where necessary.

One of the key things this assessment should highlight is where you should be spending the most of your time from a change management perspective – those that are most impacted will need the highest level of interaction.

4 steps to assess the impact of your procure to pay project infographic