The panel shared recommendations and watchouts from their respective migration experiences, stressing the need to take the right steps during the pre-, during and post-implementation phases of their projects.
Jillian stressed the importance of making the business case for the migration by interviewing AbbVie's users and business owners to identify existing pain points, understand why a change is needed and pinpoint the best solution. Gary agreed, noting the need to convince Lilly management that better software would help the company improve new drug launches.
Christy explained that Lilly invested in bringing together the leaders of their international and U.S. businesses to gain consensus for a platform change. Lilly conducted customer research to help solidify agreement.
Gary advised that since migration projects are complex and time consuming, it's important to start early to get the right people and resources in place to develop a process, manage data and determine how best to use this information. Cvent underscored the importance of getting all the key stakeholders on board at the outset.
Lilly held a series of ongoing work sessions among their internal teams during the implementation process, update meetings with Cvent and governance meetings to engage Lilly's higher level decision makers. The latter sessions helped them flag issues, mobilize the right resources and manage leadership expectations. Both AbbVie and Lilly pursued phased implementations across their geographic regions.
AbbVie created a steering committee of business owners and IT specialists to ensure internal agreement. They established committees for work streams such as purchasing, sourcing and compliance to shape a unified package for Cvent to build an event management system.
Lilly combined its own resources with those of external experts to develop a communications plan for launch. They held launch meetings with users and tapped a dedicated change management staff to assist at rollout. AbbVie developed a communications plan template that described how to convey the change to key stakeholders and when, to avoid any surprises.
Post-launch, Lilly continued to hold a series of "care" meetings with their teams to address challenges and troubleshoot solutions.
Cvent identified common pitfalls for companies to avoid during platform migration including overengineering workflow, migrating too much data, not allocating sufficient time for the many component parts of a transfer, and incurring a death by committee phenomenon.
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