Implementation timeline

Using what you have learned in this chapter, you should now be able to start putting together a list of implementation tasks with dates. First, the implementation team will need to determine the Go Live date. The best Go Live dates are during the slow season for a company and when there are no vacations planned for the members of the implementation team or the accounting system users. This may mean that January 1 is not a great Go Live date, as there are too many distractions and vacations at that time of the year.

Once you choose a Go Live date, start there and work backwards. Try to keep in mind the amount of work needed for each task and the resources needed. For example, cleaning up and renumbering a list of 2,000 customers or 5,000 inventory items may take some significant time and you should allot more time to that task than cleaning up 200 vendors. In addition, if the same resource needs to perform multiple cleanup tasks, they will not be able to do them at the same time, so you may need to either get creative and split up some of the work or allot more time for it.

If you are comfortable working with Microsoft Office Project or a similar application for your planning, that is certainly a suitable tool. However, I have seen many implementations that simply utilize Excel with great success. Choose a tool or application that you are comfortable with and that will be available to other members of your implementation team.

A sample task list with dates for our NJW sample company is as follows:

The preceding list is sorted by Finish By date for illustration purposes. You may prefer to sort yours by Start Date instead. In addition to the columns shown, you should add columns to your list showing who is responsible for each of the tasks.