Implementation Consultant

Get it actually working in the customer's world, on their systems, with their data, by the date on the plan.

Implementations rarely fail for technical reasons. They stall waiting for access nobody chased. They fill with small extra requests nobody priced. They go live on data nobody really checked. Roughly two in five data moves run over time, over budget, or fail outright — almost always because of planning rather than technology.

The plan has owners on both sides. Dates for us and dates for them, in one document both sides can see, with the customer's obligations marked as theirs. A plan where every task belongs to the supplier is a plan that stalls silently.

Nothing touches real data until a practice run has passed. The source is profiled first, so the customer learns about their own duplicates and half-empty fields early, while there is still time to decide. The mapping is agreed field by field and signed. Then a trial load runs into a system that is not the live one.

A row count is not a check. The reconciliation compares counts, totals of every amount, and a sample of records field by field against the source. Counts matching only proves the rows arrived. It is entirely possible to migrate the right number of records with the wrong balances in them, and that is how it happens.

Every extra request gets a price and a date. Not absorbed, not squeezed in. What it costs, what it displaces, which date moves, and who decides. Absorbed changes are the reason implementations slip with nobody able to say when it started.

Somebody chases every working day. Stalls get classified by cause, because each one needs a different remedy: waiting on access goes to whoever administers it, waiting on a decision goes to the decision-maker with the options and a deadline, and a sponsor who has gone quiet gets a call rather than another message.

Going live has a rollback deadline set in advance. A written sequence, checks after every step, and a time by which the decision to roll back must be made — so that call is made by a plan rather than by optimism at midnight.

And the handover is honest. What was built, where it differs from the design, what is fragile, what is still open, and who the customer's people are.