Getting a Project Back on Track

Emburse is a leading Spend Optimization SaaS firm based in Los Angeles pursuing a high-growth strategy through organic growth, acquisitions, and improved operating margins. They engaged with a 3rd party consultant to improve and re-implement Salesforce CPQ.  The project was originally estimated at 6 months but had been ongoing for more than a year and the go-live date kept getting pushed back.  Their CFO had recently taken over sponsorship of the project and engaged our consulting team to identify causes for the project delays and provide a path for getting the project back on track with a realistic plan for go-live. 

These challenges are very common.  Any CEO or CIO can tell you a story of a technology implementation that went over budget and took longer than expected.  Large complex, cross functional initiatives are never easy, but there are newer methods and practices that can be used to mitigate many of these common problems.  While we had our suspicions about possible root causes, we were very intentional about coming in with an unbiased and open mind because every organization and every situation is unique.

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In this case study, we’ll provide more details and insight into the problem statement, the solution we provided for getting Emburse’s CPQ project back on track, and the result of our work.

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The Client Situation

Emburse had been working on a Salesforce CPQ (Configure Price Quote) project to improve their sales effectiveness with an outside implementation consulting firm. The project was originally expected to take 6 months, but 18 months had gone by with multiple go live attempts missed, and CPQ was still not live.  The project had been overseen by the head of digital transformation, reporting to the Chief Operating Officer, but was being moved under the CFO for sponsorship. The project team was working towards a new go live date about two months out, but key stakeholders did not have confidence in the new projected go live date given the history of the project.

As the new executive sponsor for this important initiative, the CFO needed to know whether the current plan and latest deadline the project team was targeting was realistic to achieve.  And, if it was not, she needed to know what steps had to be taken to go live with CPQ as soon as reasonably possible. Emburse knew they had to take a different approach with their CPQ project to get it over the finish line. 

Emburse reached out to our team for help navigating this tough situation because of our extensive experience working on complex, cross functional systems implementations and our deep Salesforce and business applications expertise.

Our Solution

We proposed a 6-week Forensic Assessment to objectively determine root causes of the continued delays and make recommendations for getting the Salesforce CPQ implementation back on track.  The two outcomes we wanted Emburse to have by the end of the engagement were:

1. An understanding of the various causes of past delays.  Were they caused by the wrong architectural decisions, an unqualified consulting partner, competing priorities, undisciplined planning, or lack of competency? After our analysis, Emburse would understand the cause of the continued delays so they could learn from the past and make appropriate changes to avoid them in the future.

2. A clear path forward for achieving a go-live.  It wouldn’t be enough just to know root causes of the past delays if they didn’t also know how to avoid them going forward. Emburse needed a strategy and plan for finishing the project and going live.  We would help them create a path forward by documenting both the current state of their CPQ efforts and the future vision for CPQ based on industry best practices, and then provide them a realistic plan for going live based on modern practices.

The Basics

We staffed the six-week project with an Executive Principal and two CPQ Analysts and logically broke the engagement into three separate phases, providing a total of eight deliverables documenting their current & future state capabilities, CPQ business processes, CPQ business requirements, technology footprint, and data model.

Phase 1: Prepare

We onboarded and gained an understanding of Emburse's business, technical and cultural landscape. We got access to their internal systems, existing documentation and interviewed key players.

During this phase we began to form a hypothesis for at least one of the causes of past delays. We noticed the scope for the CPQ launch was a moving target.  During previous UAT (user acceptance testing), someone would report a gap in functionality and classify it as a “blocker” issue to the development team.  The project team would add the “issue” to the backlog, expanding the work that needed to be done before go-live.  There were no practices for limiting scope, no standard for approving new work requests, and no documented criteria for accepting the work that had been done. So, the scope kept increasing during each UAT attempt. 

Phase 2: Quantify

As we entered the next phase, we focused on clearly documenting the current state of Emburse's business processes and technical landscape.  Future vision is important but unless you know exactly where you are today, it’s impossible to create a strategy or a plan for getting to a better future state.

We spent about 3 weeks in this phase, collaborating with Emburse as one team. During this phase, the deliverables we created included a Capability Map, L3 Business Process Diagram for CPQ, Technology Footprint, and Data Model, not only representing the current state but also highlighting the current gaps and pain points. 

The output of this phase was a clear understanding of where Emburse was and where the gaps were.

Phase 3: Clarify

The focus of the last phase of the engagement was to provide Emburse with specific recommendations for their future state, combining industry best practices with our understanding of Emburse’s uniqueness, and providing a specific action plan for getting from current state to future vision. 

During this phase we created a similar set of deliverables to the current state documentation, but instead of showing current state it showed a recommended future state. 

A key recommendation was for the project team to not think of go-live as the ending of the project when they would be done with CPQ, but the earliest point of their CPQ journey where they could start realizing value.  This is the concept of MVP. It represents the smallest set of features that make a product minimally viable, where it’s just complete enough to launch, allowing future features to be developed iteratively and continuously.  For Emburse, we called it a Foundational Launch but it has the same meaning as MVP.  We needed to help them define and document the minimum set of features that they could go live with, to prevent the past issue of delaying go live because of any one small feature that wasn’t included.  We provided them with a clear visual representation of required features to be included in their launch, with the list of features that would be delivered in a fast-follow phase of rapid delivery. 

Results

Through the six-week Forensic engagement, we were able to provide confidence in the technical ability of the third-party system integrator partner, clearly document the scope of the project, define a minimally viable scope for launch and a plan for rapid enhancements, align departments on expectations for the CPQ implementation, and give the CFO confidence in a go-live plan. As a result of our engagement, Emburse had a plan for getting their Salesforce CPQ project back on track so they could move forward with their growth strategy.