The Essential Workstreams
A “workstream” is a commonly used name for a collection of functionally related tasks and activities that run from start to finish of an implementation, under the direction of a “Workstream Lead” who should be an expert in the relevant field or discipline.
In Part 1 The Elements of a System, I broke out the ERP “system” into a scheme of five elements, namely: People, Processes, Data, Technology, and Environment. I use those five elements as roots to determine the number and nature of the workstreams in my generic SME implementation. Using this structure reduces the likelihood you will forget or overlook anything important during your planning or execution.
Each workstream is the responsibility of a Workstream Lead, and all workstreams together are led by the “Single Controlling Mind”. More on those in a future article.
Change Management
Your ERP system will be useless without your employees. They are an essential part of the implementation. As end-users, all of them will need preparation, and many of them as process designers, data cleansers, data validators, acceptance testers, decision makers, and so on, will take an active role in the implementation process.
Your implementation will only be successful if your employees are kept informed, aligned, involved, supported, persuaded, and empowered. Those are the products or outputs of effective change management.
Each of your employees is unique, with their own individual agendas, thoughts, and ambitions. They may be suspicious of management-led business initiatives, hard to read, and possibly resistant to change. They may fear you are going to replace them with the technology you are implementing. Some will join or leave the organisation during the implementation window, or be promoted or otherwise change jobs.
Thus, your employees present an ever-changing tapestry of humanity. They are infinitely variable. They do not come with a user manual, and they cannot be “Googled”! The Change Management Lead should know your employees well, and have exceptional people skills.
Change Management should be one of the first workstreams to mobilise and one of the last to disband.
Training
Training is a non-negotiable requirement. There is even a stage of the implementation dedicated to it. The ideal Training Workstream Lead will be deeply knowledgeable of your business, and the system that you have designed and built.
Business and Finance
Both workstreams are concerned with business process analysis, mapping, design, and improvement.
Finance is broken into its own workstream because it is so specialised and ever-present. Regardless of business type or industry sector, many process pathways in ERP terminate within, pass through, or otherwise relate to, a finance module.
The majority of far reaching and one-way design decisions occur within the Business and Finance workstreams, therefore they must both be led by experienced and senior employees from beginning to end.
Data
The data workstream is often an underpowered and overlooked part of an implementation, but it shouldn’t be, because a clean data migration is essential for a smooth start to the operating phase of your system. If you cock up your data migration, you can’t go back and do it again, because your business is continually moving forwards. You will spend the rest of time trying to correct mistakes which will compound and expand and escape, even as you work on their origins. Underinvesting in your data workstream is an extinction-level mistake.
Data is like oxygen: most of us don’t know much about its structure, the biochemical pathways it takes during its lifecycle, or how it keeps us alive. But we all know it surrounds us, and we know we need it.
An organisation’s data is an unseen embodiment of everything that makes it what it is – information about the business itself, its employees, its customers, its suppliers, its assets and liabilities, its income and expenditure, its outstanding orders and undelivered purchases, its historic activities, inventory, raw materials, work in progress, finished goods, future commitments, resource deployments, and on and on and on.
Here are six different angles to show what is required for an effective data workstream:
- The ERP data migration challenge is to identify and collect every relevant piece of data within the legacy system (often referred to as “Extract”), cleanse, correct, de-duplicate, normalise, translate, augment, map, validate, format (often referred to as “Transform”), and finally import (often referred to as “Load”) it into the database of the new system, without errors or omissions, while the business continues to trade as normal, without interruption or loss.
- Because implementations take many months from start to finish, the data to be migrated is a constantly moving target that will change materially between the start and completion of the implementation. Data extraction, transformation, and loading will not be a one-off static task you can complete little by little.
- Data is not an amorphous homogeneous commodity. It consists of many unique records, each of which belongs to a defined type, of which there will be many, and about each of which your data team must develop expert knowledge.
- The data challenge is unique for every combination of industry, organisation, legacy system, and implementing system – and since no two organisations are exactly the same, the data approach must be analysed and designed anew for every implementation, even if the data lead has done it many times before. There will be no exact blueprint to work from.
- Much of the data transformation and validation must be performed by employees within the implementing organisation who are intimately familiar with the data. These employees already have jobs, and the data work will be an additional burden on them. This is a good example of what change management is for. The Data Workstream Lead, along with all the other leads, has a change management component to their role, which they can’t just outsource to a Change Lead.
- The ideal Data Workstream Lead has data skills, people skills, technical skills, finance skills, and business skills. A formidable combination!
Technical
You are likely to need external help from technical consultants familiar with your specific choice of ERP software for this workstream, but the lead should be internal.
Most software packages are fully documented, have an established body of knowledge and readily available training material, are largely bug free, and behave predictably, consistently, and logically. You should make those non-negotiable requirements of your technology selection.
Software is the one element of your system that you will be able to send your technical employees to be trained on prior to the start of Project 2 (The Stages of an Implementation describes how the programme is broken into Project 1 and Project 2). By the time your system goes live there will be no excuse not to have a home-grown Technical Workstream Lead on hand to continue the management and administration of your new software.
Executive
This last workstream has the Culture component of the Environment element as its root. In actual fact, there are many components within Environment which lead to different workstreams, but for clarity I have omitted the others from this high-level description.
The name “Executive” comes from the sole occupant of the workstream being the CxO. This may be considered unconventional, but this isn’t a traditional IT project; you aren’t installing a new rack of network switches, or an email server, with the CxO sitting aloof as a sponsor on a project board being reported to by a project manager.
This implementation involves the edge-to-edge upheaval of your entire business. If you think the CxO hasn’t got time to do this, consider that regularly spending a couple of hours a week helping to keep a company-wide project on track, is likely to be a better investment than spending many more hours attempting – and perhaps failing – to unravel potentially extinction-level problems which evolve outside the CxO’s gaze.
The name of the workstream belies its purpose. It is not concerned with managing or running the implementation, and the CxO should refrain from thinking they have to appear as if they are in charge. In matters within the implementation, the day-today running is performed by the Single Controlling Mind and the Project Manager (who may be one and the same). Much of the CxO’s work is attending weekly reviews, listening to what is going on, and moving silently behind the scenes to solve problems before anyone notices.
The Executive workstream is mostly for three things:
- Providing constant active visible support from a senior level. Presence is a powerful signal.
- Guiding and maintaining the culture of the implementation; keeping it aligned with the organisation’s culture.
- Keeping the decision making flow up to date throughout the lifetime of the implementation.
An article on Decision Making in a couple of weeks, will unlock more about the CxO’s role in the process.
The ideas and opinions in this article are my own; other opinions and methodologies are available.
Copyright © 2025 Henry Dale “The ERP Bloke”
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