Published on the 23/06/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Three times the REA Group attempted significant back office projects, and three times it failed because of its complex, customised legacy platform. On the fourth attempt, it turned to Agile methods…
In 1995 digital advertising business REA Group installed a Sage financial system which, 20 years on – and after some significant customisation – had become complicated, inefficient and stressful to deal with. Today, it can’t manage even simple change requests such as emailing rather than posting invoices.
But when the company decided to transition from the in-house legacy system to the cloud based NetSuite platform, it was not overly confident.
Speaking at last week’s Agile Australia conference, REA’s Tanya Windscheffel, delivery lead, and Philip Moon, the company’s finance project delivery manager, said REA had three failures under its belt in terms of migrating to new platforms.
“We have tried and failed before for a large scale project of this size – we had a Zuora implementation that ran for 18 months – but that had no business buy in,” and ultimately failed said Windscheffel. It then ran a project to decouple CRM from ERP which failed after nine weeks.
“This is our fourth attempt and we can’t afford to fail for the fourth time,” she added.
Moon agreed, noting that the company was being; “Hamstrung by our back end system – we don’t have a source of truth for finance data. We spend a lot of time checking the accuracy rather than analysing the data.” He said the company was labouring under a six month backlog of requested updates.
The degree of customisation as well as age is behind the problems with the Sage platform, Moon acknowledged, adding that this time around REA wanted to keep customisation to an absolute minimum.
Windscheffel said the company had ditched its previous waterfall approach, which features considerable upfront analysis prior to systems rollout, which, she said; “doesn’t work in a complicated state.” In any case, she said it was important not to start working on a solution until the team had identified the right problems. “Experiment early and fail fast,” was the mantra, she said.
Instead, REA applied Agile techniques, co-locating IT teams with business users to ensure better buy in, organising weekly showcases to demonstrate progress, and allowing rapid feedback. It also carved up the programme of work into nine sections.
As Moon noted; “You cannot incrementally deliver an ERP system, therefore the minimal threshold for a viable product is very high. We needed to create manageable slices of work; nine capabilities.”
Five are completed with a further four to be delivered over the next year, with NetSuite is scheduled to go live for users in November.
