Configuration and Customisation

• Requirements
• Gap analysis

1. Carry out customisations.
2. Review with Business.
3. Carry out system and integration testing.

• System configured and ready for User Acceptance Testing

When the scheduling is carried out, you will typically address particular business areas holistically. For example you might carry out the sales configuration as one activity, and the despatch as another. This will typically involve particular people from the business working almost full time with the person doing the configuration. There will be many questions to be answered and decisions to be made. In some cases those decisions will require the business person allocated to the config to escalate the question to more senior levels. A quick response is important as configuration can come to a standstill because of one decision outstanding. Worse still, if there is a delay, it may mean other work has to be undone and redone.

At the end of the configuration, there will need to be integration testing to ensure all the configuration works together. It can sometimes happen that configuration in one area causes problems in another. This is a common occurrence when various people are working on different parts of the configuration. For example, sales configuration may decide that they will configure the system to not make a delivery address mandatory for customers as some customers pick up goods. Finance may configure invoices so that they must include a delivery address. Only when the configuration is integrated will a problem be evident.

The Vendor or Integration Partner will be heavily involved at this stage. Their experience is essential to successfully configuring the system. It is not unknown that the person provided by the Vendor or Implementation Partner has limited experience. As the paying customer, it is your right to get someone who is experienced in the particular application. You are not paying to be a training ground for a new consultant. Always insist on seeing a resume of the assigned consultant to ensure you are getting value for money.

Another risk in the area of Consultants is that the Consultant may be allocated across a number of customers. If you have to adjust your schedule, the Consultant may be unavailable which might result in further delays. It is useful to ask the company providing services what arrangements can be put in place for unforeseen delays. Conversely, other customer's delays can impact your schedule if the Consultant starts favouring the other customer.

In the previous step where a the work was scheduled you will have identified dependencies between configuration and customisation. For example, until a despatch area is configured, a customised despatch screen may not be able to be built. If there are teams for configuration, and another team for customisation, they will need to work closely to ensure changes in one area do not result in problems for the other area. A similar situation exists with business process changes.