The system is never the hard part.
Seventeen years in ERP - 1992 to 2009 - taught me at first hand that systems live or die in their people, not their configuration. A first-class degree in Computing & IT, specialising in requirements engineering and socio-technical systems, later gave that experience its theory. Now I configure Dynamics 365 Field Service for social housing - a sector that came late to digital, bought in expertise it had no way to evaluate, and too often left its own IT staff to pick up the pieces.
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Agile is a phase, not a religion.
Seventeen years of ERP go-lives taught me that the same implementation fails over and over in different clothes - not because the technology is wrong, but because the people around it were treated as an afterthought. This is a method for organisations steeped in history meeting technology from the future. It has a name; you'll hear it when it's ready.
Absorb the culture
Before anything is configured, the organisation's history, habits and half-finished mergers are understood as carefully as its data. Culture is meshed into the vision of the future, never bulldozed out of the way.
Design the boundary
Every project team creates an inside and an outside, and whoever is left outside will meet the new system as a stranger. Who feels included is a design decision, and it gets made deliberately - or it gets made badly by default.
Build, the agile way
Design and develop is where agile earns its keep, and it is kept exactly there. The London Ambulance Service learned in 1992 what happens when delivery pace is allowed to outrun human readiness.
Land it with people
Go-live is a human event, not a technical one. The days and weeks immediately after cutover are where a system is won or lost, so that is where the people come back to front and centre.
A quick history
Senior Software Consultant, Syspro ERP
One of very few women in 1990s ERP, I kept noticing what the room ignored: people's anxiety and fear of change decided go-lives long before the software did. Nobody called that socio-technical then. It was empathy, and it worked.
Founded SearchFruits · Head of Paid Media, NoticeMedia
Cyber crime team, Norfolk & Suffolk Constabulary · Digital Skills Coach, Norwich City College
BSc (First Class Hons) Computing & IT - requirements engineering & socio-technical systems
Microsoft Dynamics Consultant, UK social housing
Dynamics 365 Field Service since September 2025.
Working with Dynamics 365 Field Service in social housing?
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