As consulting ERP Project Managers we seem to assume that the client side project manager knows all about testing, training and organizational change. These may be referenced in the Statement of Work or other contract as “out of scope”, but then nothing else is said about these activities.
To successfully launch an ERP system, all the key activities need to be done, even if they are “out of scope” for a particular contract. For example, companies don’t do well with a new system that they haven’t tested, running their processes through the works to make sure not only that the configuration works correctly, but that their work processes work correctly as well.
I was given an opportunity to rewrite an SOW recently, and the same can be done
with zero cost changes if a project is up and running. In the re-write process I placed in dependencies and assumptions for items in the Out of Scope section. For example, this client is responsible for all report development, fair enough, but the reports that are needed for integration testing, must be done by a particular time so that they don’t hold up testing. So I added to the “report development is out of scope” statement: “reports built by Client and needed at go-live must be built, tested, approved, and loaded into the test environment prior to X weeks after development start”. With X weeks being right before we move to Integration testing. There is probably more elegant ways to write it. The point is, the reader comes away not thinking “we’ll do that someday, but it’s not paid for here”, to “we need to make sure that gets done”.
To make it easy for clients to catch the vision, I called out the assumptions and
dependencies in the Scope and Out of Scope sections, so they are right against the work descriptions. That way, everyone gets a better idea of the full picture of what needs to be done for a successful Dynamics project, not just what the contractor is doing.
So look at your SOW / Contract. Are there things “out of scope”, that must get done? Make sure they are well described with dependencies and assumptions just like the in-scope elements.
One Step at a Time 