“Experience is the teacher of all things.”
Julius Caesar
Reflecting on Trajectory Global Services’ recent Salesforce-NetSuite implementation, Julius Caesar’s words have never felt more relevant. As a company renowned for meticulous implementations, we’ve successfully delivered complex, multi-system deployments across North America, LatAm, and EMEA. However, leading our own six-month journey to integrate and automate our order-to-cash process—from Salesforce to NetSuite—offered a rare, firsthand experience of what our clients face.
Key Lessons Reinforced
Even though we knew these principles well, experiencing them firsthand reaffirmed their importance.
The Right Internal Stakeholders Are Critical
Success depends on engaged internal leaders who drive decision-making and execution. The optimal structure includes:
- Project Sponsor – A senior leader ensuring resource allocation and resolving strategic decisions.
- Project Workstream Leads – Accountable for progress in their domains (Finance, Operations, Sales, etc.).
- Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) – End-users involved in requirements gathering, solution vetting, and testing.
- Project Manager – Oversees timelines, deliverables, accountability, and budget.
Without these key stakeholders, even the most well-structured implementation plan can stall. We found that clear role definitions and proactive engagement were essential to maintaining project momentum. One of our biggest takeaways was the need for regular alignment meetings to ensure that everyone remained on the same page, especially when balancing competing business priorities.
Thorough Business Process Documentation Is Non-Negotiable
Detailed process mapping prevents misalignment, inefficiencies, and costly rework. Stakeholders must:
- Review and refine workflows, balancing business needs with system best practices.
- Determine when customization is absolutely necessary to avoid unnecessary complexity.
- Sign-off on blueprints to ensure alignment before the build begins.
Initially, we were tempted to assume that stakeholders knew what we did operationally and how we did it, and thought we could gloss over some requirements. However, our experience underscored that skipping or glossing over documentation leads to major setbacks later. As a result, we invested significant time in validating business processes and aligning them with system capabilities, ensuring that every customization was justified.
By treating documentation as a collaborative exercise, we encouraged stakeholders to challenge assumptions and optimize workflows. This not only minimized later adjustments but also built early buy-in, which eased change management efforts down the line.
Balancing Implementation with Daily Operations Is a Challenge
Underestimating the time commitment required for implementation is a common pitfall. Many teams are already stretched thin with daily operations, and adding an intensive project to their workload can cause fatigue and slow progress.
To mitigate this, we outlined clear expectations for time investment across different roles:
Blueprint Phase:
- SMEs: 20-40 hours (meetings, questionnaires, blueprint review)
- Project Manager: 15-20 hours/week
- Project Sponsor: 1-3 hours/week
Implementation Phase:
- SMEs: 10-15 hours/module for testing and training, 12 hours/week for data migration
- Project Manager: 20 hours/week
- Project Sponsor: 1-3 hours/week
Even with this structure in place, we faced challenges. Some teams struggled to allocate enough time, particularly during peak business cycles. To address this, we adopted a phased approach where critical activities were scheduled to avoid peak operational demands. We also leveraged automation tools to minimize manual effort wherever possible.
End-to-End System Testing Requires Expertise and Diligence
Testing must go beyond functionality checks to ensure seamless workflows, data integrity, and system integrations. We used a two-phase testing approach:
- Module-Level Testing – Verifying individual system components.
- End-to-End Business Scenario Testing – Ensuring business processes worked across the entire ecosystem.
This six-week effort significantly reduced post-go-live issues. Our biggest takeaway was that early-stage testing should not just confirm that the system “works” but should rigorously simulate real-world scenarios. We involved key business users in this process to ensure that every workflow aligned with operational needs.
Additionally, we found that data integrity issues surfaced most frequently during end-to-end testing. This reinforced the importance of thorough data migration strategies (more on that below). Without robust testing, hidden issues can emerge post-go-live, leading to business disruptions and costly fixes.
Improving Our Implementation Approach
Our experiences led to key refinements in our methodology:
AI-Powered Business Process Documentation
We are now working on leveraging AI to automate documentation by summarizing meeting recordings and populating blueprint documents, reducing manual effort and improving accuracy.
By integrating AI into our documentation process, we can drastically reduce the time required to consolidate and validate process maps and to document requirements. This not only makes the blueprinting phase more efficient but also improves the quality of documentation, ensuring fewer ambiguities down the line.
Advancing Data Migration with MigrateEase
Our sister company, Initus Technologies, continues to enhance MigrateEase for Data Migration, now incorporating AI-driven data normalization and summarization that was used during our own implementation.
Key features include:
- Seamless extraction from third-party systems.
- AI-powered duplicate identification and data consolidation.
- Machine learning enhancements for continuous process improvement.
This eliminates reliance on Excel and improves efficiency, accuracy, and reliability. During our implementation, MigrateEase helped streamline data migration by identifying inconsistencies, reducing errors, and enabling a more structured approach to data validation.
A major advantage of this tool was its ability to provide real-time visualization of data transformations. This meant that instead of relying on static Excel sheets, we were able to interactively validate migrated data, identify discrepancies, and correct them before they became system-wide issues.
Client Execution Plan Dashboards
We have developed interactive personalized dashboards in Wrike (our task management solution) to keep clients focused on their personal responsibilities without being overwhelmed by project complexities. These dashboards prioritize tasks, clarify deadlines, and enhance accountability.
By implementing these dashboards, we saw a marked improvement in stakeholder engagement. With clear visibility into their specific responsibilities, teams were able to stay on track, reducing delays caused by miscommunication or lack of clarity.
A particularly useful feature of these dashboards was the automated reminders for upcoming deadlines. This helped prevent last-minute scrambles and ensured steady project progress.
A Newfound Perspective
This experience reinforced a fundamental truth: successful implementation is a partnership between client and consultant. Walking in our clients’ shoes has deepened our appreciation for their challenges and strengthened our commitment to making technology transformations not just operational—but truly impactful.
Going through this process firsthand highlighted the importance of empathy in consulting. It’s easy to prescribe best practices, but experiencing the realities of implementation provided a new level of understanding. We now approach client engagements with even greater sensitivity to their operational constraints, ensuring that our recommendations are not just theoretically sound but practically feasible.
“Perspective is everything.”
Our experience has made us better implementers, more effective consultants, and stronger partners to our clients. We’re excited to apply these lessons as we continue helping organizations navigate their own digital transformations.
About the Author – Alex Olano – CEO, Managing Partner
