Southampton FC: organization-wide change management

26 January 2018 — 1 min read

Sports

Transformation Management

To revamp their strategy, and achieve their vision to drive innovation, growth and initiate dynamic decision making, we kicked off with a case for change and helped them take it through to organization wide implementation. Here’s what happened…

In 2016 Southampton FC published a new 5-year strategy to transform the club. One of the pillars of this strategy centered on a journey to improve core back office systems, processes and data so they could improve day-to-day working practices and provide management with improved insight into key business metrics to drive decision-making.

Why Elixirr?

We were engaged for our experience of successfully running similar transformations, for our sports organization experience, and for the close fit between our team and the Southampton FC team and culture.

01 Overview

In 2016 Southampton FC had published a new 5-year strategy to transform the club. One of the pillars of this strategy centered on a journey to improve core back office systems, processes and data so they could improve day-to-day working practices and provide management with improved insight into key business metrics to drive decision-making.

02 Outcome

Board approval for the transformation project, improved ways of working, dashboard prototypes and implementation of the Workday solution across finance, HR, procurement and payroll.

03 Method

Case for Change, Sourcing, Transformation, QA

The challenge

Southampton FC had defined a clear vision and strategy, supported by strategic pillars. One of these pillars centered around providing information to the right people when they wanted it. They were looking to promote better informed decision-making and drive innovation and growth in line with their long-term business strategy.

The approach

We were asked to facilitate the development of the case for change, where we assessed Southampton FC’s current state and ensured the proposed target state was aligned to their clear vision and strategy. This included understanding and articulating the pain points and potential barriers. We then proposed recommendations that would enable them to overcome these and empower them to deliver their vision.

Existing systems and processes were identified as one of the main barriers to delivering insight. We worked in close partnership with key stakeholders from Southampton FC’s Finance, HR, Procurement and Payroll teams to scope and deliver a project that specified, selected and mobilized a replacement back office solution. We painted a picture of what the new KPIs could look like and proposed how the information could be presented using dashboard prototypes.

Once this was agreed, we applied our award-winning Collaborative Solutioning approach to solution specification, selection and contract negotiation to support them through the end-to-end selection process. The result was successful negotiation of the right contract for a new SaaS cloud back office ERP system and the systems implementation partner.

We designed the PMO framework to mobilize the project and created project assurance frameworks to enable ongoing quality assurance to ensure it’s success…

The value delivered

Following a 9 month implementation effort, the club has now gone live with the Workday solution across Finance, HR, Procurement and Payroll. The solution has been successfully rolled out to all employees.

Elixirr provided high quality solutions and service throughout the entire project, which enabled the club to make better informed decisions in the selection of both the ERP system and implementation partner. By taking the time to get to know the club and its people, Elixirr's ongoing advisory services during implementation were bespoke to address our needs and ensure the project ran as smoothly as possible. I would have no hesitation in recommending Elixirr to organizations starting out on a similar change project.

Toby Steele, Managing Director