School ERP implementation readiness guide.
A signed contract is not the same as a ready institution. Use seven decision gates to make ownership, data, authority, training, acceptance and operational fallback explicit before rollout pressure begins.
Score every gate: ready, at risk or unresolved.
A green rollout has an accountable owner, observable acceptance evidence and a dated decision for every critical dependency. “We will sort it out during training” is an unresolved item, not a plan.
Operating ownership
Name the sponsor, rollout owner and day-to-day process owner. Document who decides when policy, product behaviour and local practice disagree.
- One accountable sponsor
- Named workstream owners
- Escalation path and decision time
Data and terminology
Inventory source systems, owners, quality gaps and retention constraints. Confirm the institution vocabulary—classes and sections, batches and timings, programmes and cohorts—before migration templates are frozen.
- Approved data inventory
- Data-cleaning responsibility
- Context-specific terminology
Roles and authority
Map real jobs to least-privilege roles. Include the people who approve, reverse, export or support high-impact work—not only the people who enter records.
- Role-to-workflow matrix
- Institute and campus boundaries
- Joiner, mover and leaver process
Workflow acceptance
Write observable acceptance scenarios for the normal path, exception path, denied path and recovery path. Use synthetic or approved test data during evaluation.
- Critical journeys prioritised
- Acceptance owner per journey
- Evidence and defect triage agreed
People and adoption
Train by role and operating moment, not by a catalogue of screens. Give users a safe practice route and identify local champions for the first operating cycle.
- Role-based learning plan
- Practice environment or safe scripts
- Attendance and comprehension evidence
Support and fallback
Agree the contact route, severity model, working hours and decision owner in contract or implementation documentation. Define how the institution continues safely during a disruption.
- Contract-backed support terms
- Business continuity steps
- Restore and reconciliation ownership
Go-live decision
Set a decision date with explicit entry criteria, unresolved-risk acceptance and rollback responsibility. Measure adoption and operating outcomes after launch.
- Go/no-go authority
- Rollback triggers and owner
- 30-, 60- and 90-day measures
Carry this decision record into discovery.
Convert readiness gaps into a focused evaluation.
Use the buyer guide for selection criteria, review the published pricing model, then bring the two highest-risk gates into a discovery session.