Large scale business transformation has become a normal part of the corporate landscape, fuelled by dynamic economic conditions, compliance, accounting regulation and global capital markets which can fund ever greater cross border mergers and acquisitions. As a result of all of this change, multinational companies are constantly re-organising, seeking process efficiencies, cost savings and competitive edge, much of it underpinned by systems and process innovation.

Shared service centres, outsourcing, off-shoring and global standardisation of business processes and ERP systems have become an every day feature of corporate life. Yet by any normal measure, business transformation on this scale is both stretching and resource intensive. Furthermore, the sheer size of the undertaking often makes it highly visible and risky as project teams strive to maintain ‘business as usual' activities against the backcloth of significant upheaval.

The project-based nature of business transformation can also present unique resourcing challenges to an organisation, as the demand for people can be very ‘lumpy', and the skills required can be very specific and specialised. So where can management turn, to acquire the additional resources and expertise it needs?

The need to draw on scarce resources exactly when required, ratchet-up or stand down implementation teams at will, or deploy people globally normally rules out large scale resourcing from within the business. Freeing up skilled individuals from their line management roles can take months to negotiate and can simply create pressures elsewhere. So in many situations, management turn in the first instance to the large systems integrators and consultancies. Their strong reputations, global operations and promise of skills in depth and breadth are seen initially, at least, as a low risk option. Yet experienced programme directors suggest that wholesale abrogation to a consultancy can be ineffective and costly. Whilst consultancies may claim to have strength and depth in many areas they say that the reality can be very different.

Andy Parsons, Finance Transformation Director at AXA has been overseeing a programme to implement common finance processes across AXA's three main trading operations in the UK and Ireland using a SAP based solution. He told FSN, “We used a systems integrator and had some good resources from them initially during the design phase but also had some also-rans. So we picked very carefully who we took forward to later implementation stages of the project.”

Graham Russell, a seasoned programme director and finance professional of 25 years standing, currently VP Finance Shared Services of Equant, now a part of France Telecom, has worked in consultancy and has first hand experience from the inside. “I've shied away from consultancies ever since. They can charge premium rates for not very good resources,” he told FSN.

These experiences highlight the danger of relinquishing too much power and control to consulting firms looking to sell as many people as possible on to these large transformation projects. Nick Wood, Programme Director Oracle Finance Shared Services, for Telekomunikacja Polska, sums it up. “ Consultancies often have their own agendas and are essentially revenue driven ,” he told FSN.

So how do organisations protect themselves from being exploited by consulting organisations yet find a suitable balance of resources? Many turn to the open market for sub-contractors to recruit the temporary resources that they need. But this course of action can be equally frustrating and leave project managers with the burden of sifting through hundreds of CVs and dealing with several different recruitment agencies around the world to fill critical positions on the project.

It's a familiar situation to James Bradshaw, Managing Director of SystemsAccountants, a leading recruiter and provider of pan-European project teams for financial transformation and systems implementation. “What these organisations really need is a hybrid solution that allows them to blend internal expertise with external resources drawn from consultancies and the sub-contract market whilst maintaining overall control of manpower and costs” he told FSN.

Pivotal to the success of the hybrid solution is having a highly experienced programme director who is ‘client side' and acting in the client's interests has the authority to marshal all of the consulting, subcontract and internal resources to best effect. It's an approach that Graham Russell helped James Bradshaw to develop and refine when Graham engaged SystemsAccountants some years ago to help resource the global Oracle programme at Equant.

“James did some outstanding work for us in identifying a suitable programme director. What makes SystemsAccountants special is their niche expertise in financial systems. They understand and value the importance of a combination of finance and IT skills and as a result can track down the right people. James brought us 12 to 14 candidates and we found a superb individual. Subsequently, I discovered that two of the other candidates were hired elsewhere in the group.”

Both Russell and AXA's Parsons have been pleasantly surprised by the quality of individuals that James Bradshaw has been able to introduce, helping them to fill roles as diverse as SAP configuration consultants, business process owners, project office managers, data conversion managers and business integration lead consultants. In fact when US recruiters couldn't come up with the goods Russell turned to SystemsAccountants to fill the positions, eventually taking around 25 permanent and contract resources from Bradshaw around the world.

However, Russell is keen to differentiate the hybrid approach from traditional body-shopping. “Bradshaw took a very great personal interest in the project and the people he supplied. He would meet with them as a team every three months and spoke to me frequently during the project, letting me know of any issues that should be drawn to my attention.” Parsons also noticed the difference in approach on his project. “James would feed back issues to me directly. Effectively his oversight of the subcontractors was a ‘managed service' and in this respect very similar to the service we received from the consultancy.” The big difference is that Parsons could more easily cherry-pick the resources he wanted via the subcontract route than he could from the consulting partner. “Our decision to use sub-contract resource was based on cost. Having a systems integrator or consultancy partner is useful and has management credibility but comes at a very high cost. We could pay £600 per day for a SAP configuration specialist on the open market but a systems integrator would charge us double,” says Parsons.

The SystemAccountants' hybrid model proved successful for AXA as well although at the time they hired an independent programme director themselves. “We were capable of handling our own implementation and did not need the ‘crutch' of an implementation partner. The quality side of things is very important and in my experience even the big consultancies struggle with strength and depth of resource. We were very impressed with the quality and availability of resource that we could get from James, particularly in the SAP configuration and business analyst roles and of course they did not come with ‘baggage', such as the need to sell other services.”

“The systems integrators had a useful role to play in the design phase of the project when we needed to gear up with resources very quickly but we had more time to consider the resourcing in the build and implementation phases and therefore could rely much more on subcontract resources. SystemsAccountants hybrid approach works well. We didn't want twenty different relationships but someone who was fast and flexible, understood our needs and managed all of the subcontractors once they were on site.”

In the final analysis, success in large scale transformation projects comes down to the quality of the people on the project. “Others may be happy to offload responsibility for assembling a team to a consultancy but I think it is important to hand pick the right team,” says Russell.

Good quality resources are no longer the preserve of the major consultancies and the hybrid approach offers simplified access to highly skilled, qualified and mobile resources that are project savvy and internationally experienced. “James Bradshaw could get us well qualified CPAs and Chartered Accountants, all over the world, many of whom had first hand experience of the software we were using and who understood the applications,” added Russell. Parsons also approves of the hybrid approach. “SystemsAccountants works best alongside an implementation partner,” says Parsons and all agree that that an independent programme director is essential.

So, resourcing a finance transformation project is no longer a matter of having to choose between two extremes. If you want to keep your costs low and curb the excesses of a consultancy without impairing the quality of the delivery then experience says, hire an independent programme director and let a specialist agency such as SystemsAccountants supply and manage a hand-picked team.

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