Structuring your team for success
How can you ensure your CPQ and Billing workstreams stay in alignment on requirements, design, and timeline? How do you ensure seamless communication between business and technical stakeholders? In the final installment of our “Five Critical Insights for a Successful CPQ-Billing Transformation” series, we explore how to structure your team for success. Read on to understand the strategies you can employ to avoid common hurdles and drive a smooth transformation.
If there’s one common theme to this five-part series, it’s that communication and collaboration are the cardinal rules for a successful CPQ and Billing transformation. Any transformation that views CPQ and Billing as separate implementation projects is likely to face some serious hurdles, not to mention costly delays and rework in the future. To ensure CPQ and Billing are in alignment, selecting a single SI partner to conduct the flow of both workstreams is a wise decision. If a single SI isn’t the right fit for your needs, expectations should be set early and reiterated often that both partners must be in lockstep throughout design and build. If your business is trying to move past silos and disjointed data structures, CPQ and Billing workstreams without a strong connected working model may inadvertently introduce new versions of old challenges.
An end-to-end CPQ and Billing transformation is less likely to succeed if either workstream suffers delays or changes to scope. As such, the projects need to be managed within a larger program aligned to a comprehensive, cohesive future state. Dependency tracking and milestone mapping needs to be done both within each project as well as at the program level to ensure aligned timelines. Risks and/or blockers to one workstream may impact the larger program and should be raised and discussed as related to the program. Misaligned project timelines and structures can push the transformation timeline and, worse, seed mistrust and confusion among your users. When the time comes to push the figurative button, your team should do so with confidence.
CPQ and Billing transformations are far from easy and incorporate many teams and processes. Because of this, a phased approach may make sense for your business to tackle either high ROI initiatives or low hanging fruit first, followed by more complex or less common use cases. Even if a phased approach isn’t planned in the beginning, a plan should be made for how to handle the inevitability of deferred functionality. Features should be prioritized as your project gains steam. Even though you may not be able to capitalize on every opportunity for improvement immediately, keeping a backlog of future enhancements will guide the direction in which your project team works in potential subsequent phases. As importantly, the items in your backlog of enhancements may represent workarounds your back office team needs to be aware of.
There was no better way to wrap up our “Five Critical Insights for a Successful CPQ-Billing Transformation” series than to talk about the glue that holds everything together: program management. CPQ and Billing transformations are a balancing act of sales and billing requirements, system capabilities, and timelines. Program management is the key to ensuring a cohesive and on time delivery guaranteed to win buy in from your users.
You need a partner with deep expertise and proven credentials, but also one that moves fast, adapts to your needs, and delivers results. Ravus provides enterprise-level experience with the speed and precision of a focused, agile team. Whether you’re building a transformation roadmap, are ready to begin an implementation, or need help maintaining your revenue systems, we can help. To learn more, reach out to us at info@ravusinc.com or connect with us directly @jackson.wren and @jill.weimer
