Common Implementation Mistakes

Brian W.: I'm Brian Wishlinski with PROS travel alliances. I have Marios Prokopiou here with me.
Marios, welcome.
 

Marios P.: Thank you, Brian. I'm Marios Prokopiou. I work for ZS Associates and I lead the revenue management practice.
 

Brian W.: Excellent. ZS has started doing implementations for PROS products. What have you learned in doing implementations for PROS?
 

Marios P.: The biggest lesson we learned from this implementation is for the partner to get involved as early as possible with the presales.
 

Brian W.: Excellent.
 

Marios P.: That will make sure that the implementation will goes smooth at the end.
 

Brian W.: What do you believe is the benefit of having a partner doing the software implementation?
 

Marios P.: A partner like ZS Associates run new projects with other industries. They have frameworks and PMO charts that can be used for the PROS revenue management and software implementations.
 

Brian W.: What is a common implementation mistake that you see companies make repeatedly?
 

Marios P.: Three major mistakes the Airlines make, first one is they do not involve all their stakeholders into the whole project. Second, they concentrate only on the system implementation and not having any change management program. Third, they believe that they have all the data in place and they're accurate to be used for the implementation of the project.
 

Brian W.: Excellent. Looking at maybe a different perspective, what makes a project implementation successful?
 

Marios P.: A successful project is when there is a change management program that runs in parallel with the implementation of the system, everybody buys in into the project, all the departments, including IT, sales, revenue management are align, and where the users are involved in the whole selection of the software and are part of the super user team to run the implementation and is not only ran by managers.
 

Brian W.: Excellent. Marios, thank you very much for your time and we appreciate all the work that ZS is doing with PROS.
 

Marios P.: Thank you, Brian.
 

Brian W.: Thank you.
 

Marios P.: Thank you.