Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The Catch Up Podcast brings you candid conversations with industry leaders, consultants, and change-makers from the Microsoft Dynamics and tech ecosystem. Hosted by Phillip Blackmore, Sales Director at Catch Resource Management, each episode dives into the real stories behind business transformation, career pivots, and scaling success. Expect thoughtful interviews, practical insights, and honest reflections. Brought to you by Catch Resource Management, a leading UK recruitment specialist for Microsoft Dynamics and ERP talent, this podcast is your inside track to the people shaping the future of enterprise technology.
[00:00:00] Philip Blackmore: You are listening to the Catch Up podcast today with me, Philip Blackmore, and I'm joined by Tony Riches Program Director and published author to hear about his insights on what a successful program looks like.
[00:00:13] Tony Riches: Glaxo put an ERP solution in, and it was so badly done that we couldn't cut an invoice to any one of our 180 global clients for three months. How hard can it be to design and build one of these solutions that you can't invoice? And then I found out just how many ways there are to have an ERP disaster.
Data cleansing and migration isn't right, then stuff starts going wrong really quickly. If change isn't effectively managed, I've seen businesses bought to their knees by lack of change. Find the person who's got all the bullet holes and the bite marks and the scars. Who can say, oh yeah, you know, I did the same thing in 2008, and it was a disaster.
[00:00:59] Philip Blackmore: Tony, thanks for joining me here today. It's been a little while since we had a good catch up. I think it'll be a really interesting conversation today for our audience to get a little bit of a backstory in terms of you, your career history, journey to get into being an ERP program manager, program director, project sponsor and just get some of your valuable insights into how you see a successful program and how you, I guess, judge a successful implementation. What does a successful implementation look like? How do you, I guess really value an implementation beyond just quite simply a go live, essentially.
So if we go back to the very start of your journey career within this space, I know you joined and worked back at GSK back in 1999 doing a JD Edwards project, but was there anything prior to that, you know, in terms of getting into project management, you know, your journey into that, or was that kind of the first pure project program role that you did?
[00:01:54] Tony Riches: That was the first pure role I did.
I guess the only, in terms of my motivation to do this interesting and really challenging job is in 1996, I was the victim of a failed implementation of, I can't remember the package now it doesn't matter.Glaxo put an ERP solution in to its manufacturing sites and it was so badly done that we in the commercial department I was working in, we couldn't cut an invoice to any one of our 180 global clients for three months. We literally couldn't cut an invoice. So we ended up with a manual invoice generator based on a spreadsheet. But my team was so wedded to the manual invoice generator working in Excel that it took another three months to get them to stop using it, and that made me just say, well, how hard can it be to design and build one of these solutions that you can't invoice? So I kind of thought I'd go and find out in a less rational way than that, and then I found out just how many ways there are to have an ERP disaster.
[00:02:52] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, absolutely, and then so you went from that role in terms of, I guess experiencing it as a user, having that kind of, I guess we'd call it a bad experience going through that program.
And then you stepped into, and was that just a, you kind of put your hand up, there was an opportunity because you'd been through it as a user at GSK say and they were doing a project, you applied for a role and said, Hey look, I'd like to get involved.
[00:03:14] Tony Riches: I'd got to the point where I felt glass ceilinged. I probably was glass ceilinged with the capabilities that I had then. So I volunteered to go on a forecasting project role. It's a big step down. I went to a another location as a, I went to Stockley Park, I used to work in Ware but I was gonna Stockley Park delivering forecasting systems.
So fairly simple delivery, not generation, and from there I basically took a look at a loaded contractors all earning what was then a fortune £500 pounds a day. I was like, nirvana. So I jumped out into a delivery role with SmithKline Beecham. Got very lucky, my boss and my boss's boss all left within three months. So I ended up two rungs back up the ladder delivering and only delivering, not building, ERP solutions to much of the world that wasn't Europe and the states. From there I went to Reckitt Benckiser to build ERP solutions. These were all jobs I wasn't really qualified to do, to be frank.
[00:04:11] Philip Blackmore: Are you learning on the job a little?
[00:04:12] Tony Riches: Yeah, and I got these jobs on the basis of the previous role and being able to talk convincingly.
[00:04:18] Philip Blackmore: Yep.
[00:04:20] Tony Riches: For Reckitt which was an interesting company at the time. Really, really dynamic. I learned how to build solutions and I went from there to Barclays where I learned how to offshore stuff, more building solutions for offshoring.
So having got disparate chunks of how to, I then went to in 2005, I went to British Plasterboard.
[00:04:42] Philip Blackmore: Yeah. Yeah. It was like your first point of contact with Catch.
[00:04:44] Tony Riches: Yes. British Plasterboard, it was a failing ERP solution. They'd made the mistake of putting somebody who was really good from my business perspective, and I, this is not the last time I've seen this. Really good guy was in charge of a program, didn't know what he was doing, wasn't getting the right advice and ended up being really destructive to his career, which I thought was pretty much unfair.
I went in to turn it round. It wasn't really a role that I was completely qualified for. I remember someone wandered up to me at a party, one of my team wound up to me at a party about six months in and drunken, he said, you're a bit of a chancer aren't you? It was quite hard not to say, yeah, because I was learning on the job. I learned about a lot about, product-based planning and the kind of the role of the deliverable, the key role of the deliverable in a variety of work streams in, building an ERP. Big, big, big learning, and we ended up not going live, two months from live because they'd just been taken over by Saint-Gobain which with hindsight, it might have been a good thing.
[00:05:42] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, well, there you go, and in those early days, Tony, in terms of like sort of products that you worked with, and obviously you worked with JD Edwards a little at GSK, BPB was JD Edwards. In between those roles, did you work with any other sort of systems or was that a JD Edwards you worked with down at Barclay's or was that SAP or something there?
[00:06:01] Tony Riches: Good question. It was Edwards in SmithKline, it was still Edwards in Reckitt Benckiser. Barclays was more of a home brew.
Which was interesting from a learning how applications are built generically rather than just, you know, looking at things from a package perspective.
[00:06:21] Philip Blackmore: No, absolutely. When you look back at your early career, so those days in some of those sort of two, three, first roles, exposure to programs that you had. Is there anything that you learned through those days that you still take into your roles today? Any learnings that you think I've kind of always kept a constant with that because I saw it worked.
[00:06:39] Tony Riches: Actually what I learned from horrible numbers, what I learned from 1983, as a fresh faced graduate, busy causing chaos across the Boots warehousing division, right up to 1999. I learned an awful lot about how business works and actually for the role that I've got now, which is to be fair, more project director than program manager, but even in a program manager role, I think if you don't have that early business exposure, it's harder to do your job because it's harder to empathize with the business. Doesn't mean to say you can't make a great career by starting in consultancy and you know, if you join a big four, and learn how to deliver that way. I know some very clever people do a brilliant job but. I found that for me it was understanding how business works and how stakeholder brains work that were, was really key.
Those three or four roles taught me how to do my job technically. I think the learnings that I got in the 15 years previous were at least as important in how to manage senior people.
[00:07:44] Philip Blackmore: It gave you the human skills, the elements of kind of that psychological piece of yeah, seeing how it impacts businesses, how systems, yeah, no, it really does help, and I think it's interesting cause we often do see it and I think absolutely concur with your comments there that yeah, you do see some exceptional program managers, program directors that have just always been in a consultancy environment. But I think sometimes if they've gone through that career journey and then they try and step into then the end user world, it can be quite a seismic change for someone to then do that. Whereas if someone's been within businesses, within end users and then moved and gone into the consultancy environment, sometimes you see that transition a little bit easier that way round.
[00:08:21] Tony Riches: I found it easier having been so long client side, cause I was client side from 99 to 2013 before I went into consultancy. I actually think the client side job can be harder. It's a great training ground. If you just learn consultancy, then yeah, suddenly going client side can be a big shock.
[00:08:39] Philip Blackmore: And do you think that comment Tony about it being more difficult, is that just, is that cause you feel a little bit more responsibility? It's like you're the, you're in there, you're with the users, it's that business. It's their money. It's their investment. And obviously I appreciate consultancies, you know, take their roles extremely seriously about delivery and the importance of reputation and gathering reference sites, but do you think that's part of it? That, you know, being on the customer side, that, you know, you see those users day to day, you report into the stakeholders, you've got to take that ownership a little bit higher? It's a little bit more serious?
[00:09:10] Tony Riches: It's multifaceted. Consultancies, whilst they do take outcomes really seriously, have a restricted range of outcomes, and that doesn't mean that a consultancy can't assist a client to understand what they're supposed to be doing. But at the end of the day, consultancy responsibilities are about understanding requirements, delivering requirements, making sure they work through testing and then supporting the transition into a user base, and yet it can be more complex than that. Cause there's potentially change, potentially data, which I'm sure we're gonna talk about more. But the most difficult thing in consultancy is the resourcing side of it, to make sure that you are getting the people you need for your gig and effectively fight the client's corner within the business.
On the client's side, you've got responsibility for something, which, if any part of it doesn't work. Yeah, it's like a watch mechanism. Data migration's wrong. Project fails. Change management's wrong. Project fails. There's a big load on a consultancy earlier on, but it gets easier. I'd argue it's the other way around, from a client perspective. It's easier to start with, especially if you don't really understand the full panoply of the whole thing, because all you're really doing is focusing on making sure that the business bring the right people to define the requirements.
[00:10:27] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, and I guess that's the, is that the piece where it's almost the system's being handed back over, it's now yours, it's going into a business as usual. This is now your responsibility. It's your system to maintain, to support, do the continuous improvement piece around it.
[00:10:40] Tony Riches: It's that, and if you look at the silent project killers, everyone focuses all the time on functionality. Will it do everything we want? The things that kill projects are too much customization that's not then effectively managed. Yeah, if the data might data cleansing and migration isn't right, then stuff starts going wrong really quickly.
If change isn't effectively managed, I've seen businesses brought to their knees by lack of change management. There's a real multi-dimensional responsibility that gets tougher and tougher if it's not being done properly the closer you get to go live, and yet the closer you get to go live on the on client side, the harder it is to either say stop, which sometimes will be the best thing to do because it just gets a momentum all of its own, or to say, we need longer because budget may not be available.
[00:11:32] Philip Blackmore: Cost.
[00:11:33] Tony Riches: So of the two client, program management done properly is really demanding. On all but the biggest project the consultancy side can be simpler as long as you've got the right people.
[00:11:48] Philip Blackmore: Sure you hear comments sometimes if something hasn't gone right about the product being at fault, or you know, are we implemented Oracle, or we implemented Microsoft Dynamics and it wasn't very good, and I always find it interesting. I mean, obviously as I sit on the other side, I sit outside these projects. I supply people to work on these projects and I hear people's feedback.
But my interpretation of it is the product. You know, it's often the people that are involved in delivering that program that are often the problem, whether it's not having the right people seconded onto the project from a client side, a client maybe, I do see this sometimes customers saying to me, our consultancy partner are delivering this, we are paying them X amount of million, and it's their responsibility. And I always find it a an interesting sort of tagline, because I always think, well, it's your business. It's your system. It's your responsibility to make sure they deliver it for you successfully, and you have to take ownership and responsibility.
It's like asking someone to build you a house and them saying, well, what house do you want? You say, well, just build me a house and I'll come back in 12 months time, and then coming back and saying, well, I don't like that house. Well, you get out what you put in, you know, you need someone to project manage it for you and be engaged and understand it.
And there's a lot of really successful projects out there, and I think that's something that I also want to get a message out there is that all too often we hear about the negative. But there are so many successful projects out there, and just on that topic, Tony, I'd love, you know, to get a bit of your experience in terms of critical success factors that you think often lead to a successful, maybe smooth and effective, transformation project.
[00:13:27] Tony Riches: You can sum it up in that the first 90 days of a project will give you the end outcome and it's, it's finesse. But what you put in place in those first 90 days, you've already mentioned you have to have the right stakeholders within the project. My attitude has always been, and sometimes I've succeeded with this and sometimes I haven't, if you don't give me your leaders of the day after tomorrow. So CFO I don't necessarily want your successor in waiting unless you wanna give him to me, but I want his successor in waiting. I want the bright young person of 30, 35 who has got a sparkly intellect, has got the trust of shop floor because then they can sell the solution back to shop floor, cause it won't be necessarily everything they want and it certainly won't be a replication of what they've got.
So I want the right people. You have to set up the right framework for change management. You need a really good change lead and change is all about change impacts. It's not about how are we gonna communicate, it's what, what's gonna change and then migration needs to be fully understood with the right resourcing from both client side and consultancy.
You know, I could go on, I could probably fill another 15 minutes. There are a series of success factors that have to be owned, by senior stakeholders. If they're not in place by the end of the first 90 days, they're not going to be. Do the senior stakeholders really own the outcome, or are they doing it because they're told to? The really successful programs, I think happen where a great project director or program manager are either on client side or potentially on consultancy side who can actually sell this to a client, make sure that the planks for success are placed early on because six months in you've got what you've got.
[00:15:23] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, no, I understand that. And Tony, have you ever been into an environment where you kind of get into a program and you feel that there is a little bit of a, I guess a lack of buy-in on the customer side from certain senior stakeholders? Cause I sometimes hear it that, you know, this is a finance led project, or this is an IT led project, and there can sometimes be a little bit of resistance between those two elements of the business.
You know, going in there, whether it be you going in as the program manager within the customer side, sitting in between those or going in as there. So how do you look to try and overcome those challenges? You know, have you experienced that personally? And if you have, how do you look to try and overcome those issues?
[00:16:02] Tony Riches: Yes, and I think you're much more likely to have to manage them, on the client side, unless I can highlight them they may not be able to enact change. As a client program manager, yes, I've encountered them. The best program managers, a mutual friend of ours, Graham Lockhart springs to mind
[00:16:22] Philip Blackmore: I spoke to Graham yesterday.
[00:16:24] Tony Riches: Yeah, he's got a very non-confrontational, but very direct communication style. Something to do with him being a glaswegian perhaps. You have to face up to the individual, and sadly, in a way that Graham's very good at, you have to take responsibility for this. If you don't, then it's likely to impact your business. You own the project for your business, and I need you to help me. If the individual still really isn't interested. I've got a particular person in mind as I say that who leaned back, put his feet on the desk with a big cigar, unlit cause it was a no smoking office, and basically said, this has got nothing to do with me. Literally. Then all you can really do is be straight with them, tell them that you're gonna do this, and then you have to go to the sponsor and say, you have a part of the business which is not interested in delivering this.
You don't wanna start an internal civil war or become an enemy for that person. It's something never to do behind their back. Be really clear what and why you're gonna escalate, you know, do it with a look, you leave me no choice.
[00:17:28] Philip Blackmore: And again, when we talk about the success of project, it's having a very clear communicator leading that project. Communicating back to the business, communicating with their SI. Do you have to adapt your communication styles as well? Obviously, we're not dealing with robots, we're not dealing with products that are just the same. You know, you Tony, as a program director are dealing with human beings. Could be a CFO, you know, accountancy background, different brain to a CIO, who might be slightly more technically minded. Do you find you have to adapt your communication styles and just have to have slightly different hats on at times when you're kind of dealing with different people within these programs?
[00:18:06] Tony Riches: Yes and no. The yes side of that question is absolutely, you have to find arguments to work with the individual and you will talk to a CFO in a different way that you'll talk to a CIO. However, I mean, there is a degree that yes, I am Tony, and you get what you get. I think we're all like that to a greater or lesser degree. I think if you bend your communication style outta shape to try and get through to somebody, it probably feels...
[00:18:31] Philip Blackmore: You lose authenticity, I guess, of your own true self. Yeah.
[00:18:34] Tony Riches: So you've gotta stay true to your own style. But yes, you do have to try and find an argument that will resonate. So someone said to me, a very senior Glaxo director said to me. I do spend about a third of my time working out how to get what I want, and at the time I thought sounds a bit selfish. And then 30 years later, I totally get it. He was like a chess player. He knew what to say to people to, to get the outcome he needed for his role, and there's a, there's an element of that.
If you dunno how to ask for what you want,you're not likely to get it.
[00:19:11] Philip Blackmore: No, I understand. It's a bit like that kind of as you were saying that, I was thinking of a you know, a highly successful coach whether it be a rugby team or a football team, or a, whether it be cricket, and you think about them managing those different personalities, different egos.
It's like, how'd you get the best out of a, an Andrew Strauss or a Kevin Peterson? Totally different ends of the spectrum, you know? But you've gotta think about how you deal with those people maybe slightly differently, and that's like say, how do you get what you want out of it?
[00:19:39] Tony Riches: There's a range, isn't there? there's going into the, I hate the term, but going into the C-suite. There's going in as Mr. Billy Big you know what,and alienating very senior people who've got important and difficult jobs to do and I think if you pitch it at the level of, I've done this lots of times, I've always got something to learn, but what I've seen previously as a result of what I'm gonna talk to you about is this. Sell the success, but also explain the potential failure
[00:20:06] Philip Blackmore: Yeah. yeah, you can kind of see what's coming down the road. The experience allows you to kind of recognize behaviors and those, and kind of say, look, if we keep going down this path, I know what's gonna happen. We've got an opportunity to change. Yeah, no, absolutely, and then Tony, if we go back to a little bit about, you know, your career path journey. So you were at BPB, you did JD Edwards there, you then moved on from there.
[00:20:29] Tony Riches: The next few years, I spent about nine months on a gig in Holland, an SAP gig, which I wouldn't call it a side show, but they got taken over and the project got shelved. So it was useful learning about SAP from a planning perspective. Then I got what I consider to be the really big break, which was, Howden
[00:20:48] Philip Blackmore: Yeah.
[00:20:48] Tony Riches: Amazing gig, utterly let down by a smallish SI which I won't name. They've been absolutely led up the garden path and I went in and did a review, which took me literally two days. I had a week for it, took two days. People know what's going wrong. I just walked around, asked people what was going wrong, added my own, here's what I diagnosed, wrote it up, and then got the gig of turning it around, and it was a fabulous job because the project team were really, really strong.
They were just being misled and actually knowing what I knew about how to deliver an ERP program. Being able just to say, guys, let's do it the right way. This is the right way. They dived on that, and did a brilliant job of delivery. And in fact, I was very fortunate with the quality as well. The finance product owner is now, a very, very senior CFO in one of the sister companies. So that was the kind of quality of person I'd got. So it was very fortunate.
[00:21:52] Philip Blackmore: It helped.
[00:21:53] Tony Riches: So that's where I really, really cut my teeth on proper rescue.
[00:21:57] Philip Blackmore: And that was your first exposure with Microsoft Dynamics?
[00:22:00] Tony Riches: It was.
[00:22:01] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, and coming from, I guess sort of JD Edwards, which you know, very well established ERP products at the time, you know, back in 2007 was probably Howden, so you know, Microsoft Dynamics as a product sort of still fairly early days in its, I guess, what do we say? Like it's development, it's functionality, how long it had been around. I imagine at that time, Howen was probably one of the bigger projects that Microsoft Dynamics was going into. You know, there probably wasn't a whole host of, I guess, reference sites that were a good cause. It was US, UK, truly global.
Yeah, truly global.
[00:22:38] Tony Riches: Yeah. Yeah, it was.
[00:22:38] Philip Blackmore: And which version were we? 2009 or version four then?
[00:22:41] Tony Riches: It was four.
[00:22:42] Philip Blackmore: It was four. Yeah. So yeah, thinking back to version four, I can think of very few what was then Microsoft Dynamics AX version 4.0 Global projects. So, and from a product perspective, JD Edwards very established, have been there, seen it and done it with, you know, large pharmaceutical companies and then going in and implementing relatively immature product in Microsoft Dynamics.
Did you see a lot of differences between the product? Did it give you, as the program manager, greater challenges the product being different? Or does your role remain kind of I'm process driven. This is what I do.
[00:23:15] Tony Riches: Very much the latter. I'm not technical. I think the advantage it gave us, because Howden was a, instead as a custom engineering business, they had a very particular functional requirements, and in those days there was really nothing stopping you from building what a client absolutely wanted. You know, Microsoft oversight was minimal.
We had some extremely strong technicians in the team and some people who were kind of cleverer than I think I had any right to expect given the state of the project with this is the process we need. So it was really easy. Now there's a downside to that. When we move on to what was effectively my next gig, which was a major iron and steel company.
[00:24:03] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, Stemcor?
[00:24:05] Tony Riches: Yeah. The sheer flexibility of the product. Was actually, I think with the joy of hindsight, a bit of a, an achilles heel for them because the chairman now sadly departed, had built the previous system himself.
[00:24:20] Philip Blackmore: Okay.
[00:24:21] Tony Riches: He was determined for it to be his train set, and they ended up with a, to best of my, understanding with a 50 person Indian development unit
[00:24:30] Philip Blackmore: It's huge. Absolutely huge.
[00:24:32] Tony Riches: It was literally not a step back from our current functionality, that thing you're not supposed to do. They were just replicating the As is in the two B down to a micro granular, other detail costing a fortune, and I doubt it ever got put live because of the wider issues that Stemcor had commercially.
[00:24:52] Philip Blackmore: There were, yeah, the commercial issues, I think kiboshed the whole project fundamentally.
And just on that topic, you know, when talking about customization, how do you navigate those challenges? You know, there's obviously a balance for the need for standardization and best practices, but also businesses have unique requirements. Not every business is the same. So then the nuances of, you know, customizing a system, standard systems. How do you offset those challenges Sometimes with a customer?
[00:25:19] Tony Riches: Yeah, I learned that painful lesson on BPB. We had a French pilot and the French product owner, finance product owner, a delightful lady called Mrs. Teapot, Dominique Tepo, kept on coming round with, and we need to make all these changes. Okay, why? Oh they are French legal requirements. To which my answer should have been, go on then show me the law.
Now it would've been in French. I'm not sure I'd have understood it, but the point I'm making is, and again, I'm gonna channel my inner Graham Lockhart, who's very good at this. Is, okay we have this list of a hundred things you want to change. I'm gonna tell you, you're not gonna get any of them. Now, tell me what the impact of that is on your business, because this is a, it's a very well developed package solution with a tremendous amount of different businesses reflected in its functional makeup. Tell me what it is you don't get and how much damage it does to the business if you don't get that.
I know there's this syndrome of don't care about data, don't care about change. Functionality must have all the fun, you know? And that is such a slippery slope to go down. So my attitude is, you're not having it.
[00:26:31] Philip Blackmore: Yeah.
[00:26:31] Tony Riches: You're not having it now. Now tell me what that does. And then when the business is going to be genuinely impaired by the lack of that functionality, then you start talking about, well, it's gonna cost this much. Would a manual solution, would a workaround be better? Or do you want to spend that much both in terms of developing and testing, and then for life for lifecycle, maintaining that revised functionality or not?
[00:26:56] Philip Blackmore: Absolutely, and it's that piece. It's like, well, once you've done that, once you've made those customizations it, you're then gonna have the same challenge 3, 4, 5, 6 years down the line, if you wanna upgrade your system, you're then gonna have to redo all of that again. As opposed to just kind of maybe going with a more standard process.
[00:27:13] Tony Riches: With Evergreen, theoretically, you're having to regression test with every new release that Microsoft put out. It becomes a burden and will definitely cost money from a application lifecycle management perspective.
[00:27:27] Philip Blackmore: And then you finish up. So with Stemcor, we know the sort of situation there. And then did you go to in, was that Infor in between then?
[00:27:35] Tony Riches: Before that I went to, I went to a company called Stadco in Telford for six months to help them try and choose an ERP. So I dropped outta 365 and basically I learned how amusing it can be to be allegedly the person who's driving the decision as to who gets to sell or not. So the kind of phone call, the phone call on the, in the car on a Friday night going back from Telford to home in Hartfordshire where the, I'm not gonna name the company, but the salesman would ring up and say, now what do I have to do to get this? You have to give me your best price. But what do I have to do? You have to get off the phone, now. That was really useful in terms of understanding how ERP solutions are selected then I went to Infor for another six months. The job was supposed to be working for the global delivery VP and solving, you know, basically going in and solving problem projects, which sounded fantastic.
[00:28:29] Philip Blackmore: I remember at the time.
[00:28:31] Tony Riches: The reality was, going into clients and saying, no, we haven't got any resources to help you.
[00:28:36] Philip Blackmore: Wasn't much fun.
[00:28:38] Tony Riches: No.
So I did two of those circular firing squads and then bailed and was fortunate enough to get a gig which lasted 10 years with Hitachi solutions.
[00:28:47] Philip Blackmore: That then goes, brings you back into the Microsoft dynamic space, and with Hitachi solutions, I think probably when you joined, they were going on a fairly significant journey of exponential growth. You know, as a business. They picked up a number of what I would call at the time, some of the bigger programs on a global scale that were being delivered by any SI at that time they were, cause obviously before, back then, you didn't have your PWCs or your EYs operating in the space so much.
Hitachi were probably the biggest brand name maybe from a consultancy perspective? Hitachi felt like what I would describe as a core Microsoft Dynamics consultancy practice. There weren't many bigger at that time that you joined, I guess
[00:29:26] Tony Riches: You say that they were about 60 people.
[00:29:29] Philip Blackmore: When you joined?
[00:29:30] Tony Riches: Yeah, it could have been less. I mean, the number 35 is in my head for some reason. These were in the days when most people were in the office a lot of the time, if not on client, and they fitted into one office with, I don't know, 25 chairs in it.
But they grew exponentially.
And I just watched this with my eyes wide as they went from, let's call it 50. 50 to a hundred to 200 to 500 in the space of only a few years.
[00:29:58] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, I remember it.
[00:30:00] Tony Riches: Fabulous business growth
[00:30:02] Philip Blackmore: And in terms of the projects that you were then engaged to do for them, you were being engaged as a program director?
[00:30:07] Tony Riches: Mostly, yeah.
[00:30:08] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, and what'd you put some of that success down to there? You know, having been inside an organization like that, going in that exponential growth, was it that they had a clear methodology?
Was it that they had and, and I know they had some brilliant people, but also, was it the point, and I sometimes, you know, and this is often you described it about that conversation with the chap in the car. You know, you know, what do I need to do? what's the price need to be? Did Hitachi do a good job of getting it right between sales, as in this is what we're saying to a customer, it's gonna cost and delivery.
[00:30:40] Tony Riches: Yeah, and the Infor gig was fascinating, in that there was clearly some selling that had happened, which was then extremely hard for delivery to live up to, and, and there always, there's a healthy tension between sales and delivery. In any consultancy, there has to be, or you either wouldn't sell or you'd never deliver.
[00:30:59] Philip Blackmore: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:31:00] Tony Riches: I felt that Hitachi were, and with the joy of having now been doing this for 15 years, they were pretty good at selling something that was deliverable. None of the gigs I was on wherever particularly easy. Because there's always that tension and you can find yourself really scrambling to sometimes to deliver.
There were some great people. They did put together a really strong methodology, which I think has been replicated, certainly in, not necessarily in content, but in concept elsewhere. So there was a really clear delivery method being delivered by some outstanding individuals and the sales were, I didn't ever feel like it was the charge of the light brigade.
Now they certainly do have a sales to delivery process to catch issues at the point of sale that may make delivery hard as a result of one or two learning experiences. But I think they were probably better than some of the competition, not selling outrageous stuff, and the other thing was some of the competition at that time, some of whom failed, clearly would undersell at the point of sale.
[00:32:11] Philip Blackmore: Yep.
[00:32:11] Tony Riches: They get to the point of that being a problem, they then give stuff away implicate the client, and the revenue spiral would just, you know, you're making less and less out of a gig, suddenly you're losing money on a gig because of the amount of compensation that you're having to put into something because you weren't frank with the client in the first instance, or didn't have the right people to deliver and therefore start to run into issues that are of your making and not the client.
[00:32:38] Philip Blackmore: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:32:39] Tony Riches: Is about managing client expectations and making sure that they understand what they've got to bring to it.
[00:32:45] Philip Blackmore: Is that something you look to set out? If you go into a program,you know, within the infancy of a project, you know, you're going through that kind of,that early kickoff conversations. Is that something that you look set out kind of from the offset Tony, in terms of emphasizing the importance to the customer, what is required from their side?
[00:33:03] Tony Riches: It's those first 90 days.
[00:33:05] Philip Blackmore: Yeah.
[00:33:05] Tony Riches: It's not just about the client. Obviously there is a need to, for the consultancy to rock up with the right people. But I think there's this, and you've already mentioned it, there's this, misunderstanding for sometimes from a client perspective, which is you are the experts, you are gonna tell us everything.
I think it does behoove, especially if they haven't got one of the really good project directors that are on the market, doing the job for them. It does have a consultancy right from the start to say, these are the things you need. So take change management as an example. It's not enough for you to be starting to think about change once you've got a system built. Your change resource needs to be there from day one. Needs to be understanding, needs to be working through with the business.
The functionality? What's gonna change? What do we gain? What do we lose? And therefore how do we manage those impacts? How do we communicate them? How do we mitigate them? What metrics are we gonna use to make sure we understand what good looks like so that we know post live, whether we're still actually delivering for the business? I think it does behave a consultancy to tell the client that I'm not sure it always happens.
[00:34:13] Philip Blackmore: Sure.
[00:34:14] Tony Riches: That's why I would encourage any senior sponsor, who's about to engage in that journey to either recruit the absolutely best project director, they can get off the market or find someone who can assure it for them. They need to have someone who's done it time and time again telling them what they're gonna fall over because the consultancy may not do so.
[00:34:39] Philip Blackmore: That piece you mentioned earlier, isn't it? Having someone that can see what's coming up the road or recognize those kind of telltale signs of like, I've been here, I can see that there's some behaviors, or there's some actions that there's some warning lights sort of, you know, ringing ahead that and if we don't make some changes now, there's gonna be further problems down the line.
I think it's been a great conversation covering off your experiences, your insights into programs, but, and you've kind of highlighted it a little bit there yourself, but if you are sat there today, sat opposite a program sponsor, CFO, CIO that says, hey Tony, and it's a pal of yours that I'm just about to embark on. We've selected a product, we've selected an SI just about to start a new program of work. What advice, you know, or what learnings or what guidance would you look to kind of highlight to that individual to kind of say, look, maybe be aware of this. Think of that. Is there sort of two or three things that you'd say, look, I implore you, please just make sure you do these two or three things. If you do these two or three, four things, you've got a good chance of success.
[00:35:38] Tony Riches: It would be making sure that you have across the board the right people from within the business in your team. It's the successor of the successor. bring together the strongest possible team. My line is you have the opportunity to give those people the keys, the absolute keys to the business, in terms of their understanding, and them delivering the value that you need in terms of a solution that's gonna enable you to function. So, putting your best people into it can only work both from a delivery and a career development perspective for your key individual.
It's about making sure that you've got a really concrete and documented and agreed understanding of what the consultancy you've employed are going to do. What they're not gonna do because they're gonna be expecting you to do that, and then I guess it's making sure that the plans that are in place for all the stuff that's not functional delivery. Yeah, the functionality needs to be right. But it's about if you focus your attention on chasing the functionality and don't think about the key things that can stop that watch from working. Critically data. Critically change. Critically testing. That's often the that gets squeezed.
[00:36:56] Philip Blackmore: Left to the last minute.
[00:36:58] Tony Riches: Yeah, a really, really strong test lead is absolutely needed to stop you from deciding not to do testing properly. Cause it's often quite seductive. We can hit the budget by only doing two weeks rather than four.
I've got one more thing, which I would absolutely encourage them to find the person who's got all the bullet holes and the bite marks and the scars, who can say, oh yeah, you know, I did the same thing in 2008, and it was a disaster.
Having a proper senior assurance person who stands independent of the consultancy, an independent of your internal project director is so important because you know, you need that independent eye the sky to just to point out where both sides might be getting it wrong.
[00:37:44] Philip Blackmore: Absolutely, that's really useful, Tony. It's a great insight to have because from your background, your experience, the success that you've had delivering programs over a multitude of years now. If those insights are, you know, highly valuable for anyone that's about to go on that journey or thinking about going on that journey about what they, a business as an end user customer, what they need to put in to successfully deliver a project, I think it's highly important.
So that's really, really, really useful insight. Thank you for that.
And just Tony, just before you go. Obviously the job you do day in, day out can be a pretty stressful job. I know a little bit about what you used to do and I just wanted to ask you a question if you still do it. Are you still, you know, in your downtime to relax to unwind from the stresses and strains of program directorship in ERP, do you still write to this day? You still writing?
[00:38:31] Tony Riches: If you go on Amazon, Anthony Riches, there are now I've now written 18 Roman.
[00:38:38] Philip Blackmore: Wow.
[00:38:39] Tony Riches: Two thrillers, and I'm just in the process of trying to sell a Troy series. So the answer is, yeah, I do.
[00:38:48] Philip Blackmore: Yeah. Brilliant. Please go and have a look. I'll have a look myself and thank you very much for your time today. Tony go on.
[00:38:53] Tony Riches: And YouTube Romani Walk. If you want a laugh, YouTube Romani Walk. Romani were those Roman with an I on the end you'll see me and two other idiots back in 2015 doing Capua to Rome in full Roman armor and we got we got Gandalf to narrate it. Ian McKellen agreed to narrate it cause it was for charity.
[00:39:12] Philip Blackmore: Oh, super.
[00:39:13] Tony Riches: So that's worth the look as well.
[00:39:15] Philip Blackmore: Fantastic. Well, thank you Tony. I really appreciate your time today. It's been great.
[00:39:19] Tony Riches: Pleasure. Thank you.
[00:39:22] Philip Blackmore: Thank you all for listening today. Please subscribe to stay up to date with our latest episodes or watch the full video episodes on YouTube.