BilkentMBA2010, Lessons Learned, Week 3, Gun Gokmen

Week 3 started with the concept of change management.

• As an introduction, we started with the source of resistance: why do people resist to changes in their workplaces, and we talked about some instances. A salesman, for example resists to an ERP system because entering the information to the system requires time, which can be traced to lost sales eventually. Or they may not want to share their sales or customer information with the others. There ale solutions to this problem, like communicating and convincing them that the system will benefit them eventually, and to show them how to get benefit from the system as a tool. Or these people could be given incentives to use the system.
• Norm is a culture, which is not written. This affects the change efforts.
• The change management also involves trainings for different levels in a company: Core team training, management seminar, end user training. I used to give end user trainings and remember my hard times because of the resistance of the users. They looked forward to seeing some problems with the software and not to use it. I learned that training the trainers sessions I've once attended was a mean of change management concept.
• Business process reengineering makes business processes leaner.
• Do biz process optimization or ERP implementation first? Best to do hand in hand, but getting ERP before could be better because ERP already provides "best practices"
• Business process procedures (BPP): documents to define steps in processes. They also represent the actual business processes of a company because ERP processes REPLACE the old processes. A good transactional document also includes clues of the actual process.
• The Silo Problem: Departments working distinctly of each other, doing their own work and "throwing off the wall" But they should work together.

Then we did Risk Assessment and analysis

• 1. identify the risk 2. identify impact 3. identify probability 4. Risk index 5. Find its mitigation
• Risks: technical or related to people
• We did an example of network down for a day... Red index.
• Risk assessment can be used as a project management tool. Could be done monthly, twice a year, in the phases of a project, etc.