Remote software delivery — a conversation with an ERP consultant

Since December 2019, organizations have transitioned to remote work due to international travel restrictions imposed by the pandemic. Despite the initial challenges, businesses are adapting well and have realized the potential of remote work and its effectiveness.

The growing positive attitude toward remote work is evident in PwC’s 2021 US Remote Work Survey: 83% of employers now say that shifting to remote work has been successful for their company, compared to 73% in their June 2020 survey.

In December 2019, Fortude rolled out Virtual Global Delivery (VGD), a remote delivery framework encompassing governance, skills, human and technology resources, and robust collaboration.

We spoke to Ranika Amarasena, Senior Consultant at Fortude, to find out how the Fortude VGD framework has fared in remote software implementations and his thoughts about the present and the future of remote work. Ranika also shared learnings from his experience in delivering ERP implementation services remotely for two global fashion companies.

Ranika: Remote working has most definitely worked well for me. I’ve been able to achieve the right amount of work-life balance, which is great. The time I saved on commuting back and forth to work gave me more space for managing work and my personal responsibilities.

Ranika: During the start of the pandemic and the beginning of the remote working period, I was working on two projects.

The first project was for a European apparel manufacturer. While the initial phases of this project were completed, we had to complete the UAT, go-live, and post-go-live support phases, remotely.

The second project was for a wholesale footwear company based in the US. This is an ongoing project, which was delivered virtually from inception. Currently, we are working on key deliverables such as requirement gathering, gap analysis, scenario testing, solution design, EDI integrations, system configuration, key-user training, and integration testing.

Ranika: The fact that we don’t get to sit in the same room with the customer can be challenging. For example, not having interactive discussions during the requirement gathering phase, not using a physical whiteboard to brainstorm, and not being able to navigate the system during demos and training were key challenges. Understanding the customer’s emotions and working across different time zones too was not easy.

We had to adapt our remote collaboration tools to overcome these challenges.