When David was engaged at this Utility company, the SAP project was in its infancy – in fact, it was little more than a business case requiring approval. With a track record of successful delivery in SAP HR and Payroll, David was asked to look at the €7.2 million budget for the project to ensure it would cover the delivery. He quickly challenged the assumptions as they were based on one manager's experience in a previous company with very different circumstances. €7.2 million was very optimistic. This was going to be an implementation across five different businesses resulting from an acquisition, with no integrated or harmonised processes or standardised employment terms and conditions. David persuaded the Board that the SAP implementation would realistically cost upwards of €25 million, which indeed turned out to be the case.
The UK Project had just started, when the parent company in Germany decided it wanted to roll out HCM and Payroll globally...and David, was asked to Project Manage it. This involved the agreement and delivery of a common template for Germany, Romania, UK and the Nordic countries and the roll out of OM, PA, Comp and Bens, Travel & Expenses, Time Management, Payroll, BI reporting, ESS and MSS.
This posed many challenges, not least of which were the cultural differences between managerial styles. David had to tread a careful path to challenge decisions he didn’t believe in, made by the German Board. The differences extended to the way projects were managed in different countries. For example, the German team wanted to dedicate just one week to scenario testing, when David was advocating three months. Indeed he found an unjustifiable confidence that the configuration would work first time. David turned out to be right and scenario testing required three months. Further challenges involved ensuring that individual countries adopted a common template with minimal variation and configuration costs.
The programme sponsor said, “The Project was to design and implement SAP ECC 6.0 HCM via a global common template for HR and Payroll into Germany and Romania (introducing changes to their existing SAP HR solution) and then design and implement local solutions for the UK and Nordics. All of this has been delivered on schedule and within budget. David provided the expert programme and project management skills and was responsible for all the formal project management, governance, planning and control across all work-streams in the different countries. He was particularly good at managing the different cultures, constraints and challenges of running a multi-national project team. He excelled at listening and understanding the differing points of view and of aligning the inevitable different approaches and views to ensure complete synchronization across the global team. I recommend David highly.”
