Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

Planning for Best Practices

A critical issue for the success of any best practices implementation project is an adequate degree of advance planning. The following bullet points describe the key components of a typical best practices implementation plan:

• Capacity requirements. Any project plan must account for the amount of capacity needed to ensure success. Capacity can include the number of people, computers, or floor space that is needed. For example, if the project team requires 20 people, then there must be a planning item to find and equip a sufficient amount of space for this group. Also, a project that requires a considerable amount of programming time should reserve that time in advance with the programming staff to ensure that the programming is completed on time. Further, the management team must have a sufficient amount of time available to properly oversee the project team’s activities. If any of these issues are not addressed in advance, there can be a major impact on the success of the implementation.

• Common change calendar. If there are many best practices being implemented at the same time, there is a high risk that resources scheduled for one project will not be available for other projects. For example, a key software developer may receive independent requests from multiple project teams to develop software, and cannot satisfy all the requests. To avoid this, one should use a single change calendar, so that planned changes can be seen in the context of other changes ...