There are several key reasons for having the customer lead during the implementation. "In general, it is more valuable to help clients make decisions for themselves than to go through part of all of the process for them and provide recommendations". 1 Second, the pace that the customer executes is more consistent with the pace at which the organization can manage change. As I learned in my five-year experience with accelerating implementations: there is no value in moving faster than what the customer's organization can handle. Third, customer empowerment is critical to improving decisions and reducing decision-making cycle time. Enabling the customer to lead will inspire confidence and confidence has a direct impact to decision-making. Finally, customer enablement reduces packaged software Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) because the customer will not require outside help every time the customer needs to change the configuration of their packaged software.
As the customer's ability...