Fixing the broken rollout of a financial management software
THE CHALLENGE
Inizio is a holding company for several advisory and marketing communications firms that function as separate businesses. Inizio’s clients are large pharmaceutical companies. Private equity firm Clayton, Dubilier & Rice owns Inizio, which has 11,000 employees in 50 countries.
The firm hired Trouncem CEO Brian Pia as its change management and communications lead 1.5 years into the rocky rollout of Certinia for Salesforce—an off-the-shelf financial management software. The goal was to find out what was going wrong and fix it.
THE WORK
Brian led discovery sessions with IT executives, division leaders, subject matter experts, project managers, and finance executives to understand the problems. He determined the Marcom companies had dramatically different financial software needs than Inizio’s advisory firms. That required tailoring the software. But that caused it to break other software components. Employees were frustrated. They said they were fixing a plane while flying it. Some spent 50% to 100% of their time on the software rollout instead of doing client work. Developers rushed to tailor the software and make other improvements under tight deadlines. Inizio’s small IT and Fluido teams were overwhelmed with ServiceNow and Jira requests.