Onboarding

The fastest and most efficient way to get up and going in is to take advantage of our onboarding service. It is a proven program that covers all of the required steps for installing, configuring, and working with VOGSY. Our experienced onboarding consultants can also help you you set up your integrations.

The following sections detail the content of the sessions that make up the onboarding program.

Kick off

This session usually last 1.5 hours.

Prerequisites

All required customer participants should be present for this call.

Agenda for the call

  • Introductions for anyone new

  • Set/confirm goals and milestones

  • Processes in scope for first go-live

  • Walk through current tooling list (retain, replace or integrate)

  • Firm up team members and roles and agree communications

  • Understand the onboarding steps

  • Activate VOGSY (hooray!)

  • Agree timing and team members for next call

Preparing for the first real session

Before the first real onboarding step can happen, your work package will be to get your hands on VOGSY as a self-learning exercise and create the following:

  • A customer organization

    Make sure that you set the invoicing email address in the organization record to your personal email address so that the invoice doesn’t accidentally get sent outside of your test group.

  • A contact for that organization

  • An opportunity

  • A quote for that opportunity

  • A few employees who can staff the project that you create and log time (ideally, use members of your onboarding team for this)

  • A project (please replicate a real project as closely as possible)

  • The resource planning for that project (using the employees mentioned above)

  • Time entries on the project

  • An invoice

Session 1: Evaluate self-learning

This session should last for about three hours.

Prerequisites

  • Previous work package finished

  • All agreed upon team members in the call

  • Questions/comments logged in feedback sheet

  • VOGSY@<customer.domain> created

What happens during session 1?

During this session, we will discuss your questions and observations that might have resulted from completing the self-learning exercise. This should uncover potential knowledge gaps and business mapping questions. Addressing those together will help you tremendously in the next session; which includes configuring all the settings and populating the system with the Setup Assistant.

We will also walk you through the different components of VOGSY’s Setup Assistant in order to prepare you for your next session assignment.

Session assignment

Your session assignment is to complete the following components of the Setup Assistant:

Basic Setup

All settings

Resources Setup

All settings

If you have a large number of employees, please enter a fair representation of various roles (approx 10-15).

CRM Setup

Only if applicable

Projects Setup

All settings

Accounting Setup

Only complete Step 3 (Revenue Types) and Step 4 (Currencies)

The final step of this session is to decide who will complete which parts of the session assignment as well as to plan the next session and decide who should attend.

Session 2: Business Mapping

This session should last for about three hours.

Prerequisites

  • Previous session assigment finished

  • All agreed upon team members on the call

  • Questions/comments logged on the feedback sheet

The purpose of this session

You’ll want to be sure that VOGSY maps to the way that you want to run your business. And that’s what we will verify during this session. We do this by first of all ‘sanity-checking’ your configuration details in the Setup Assistant. This is also a point at which we address any and all questions you have gathered as you were configuring VOGSY.

As a result, your understanding of how VOGSY works and how it maps to your business will be sound and the system will be configured so that you are ready for some real simulation work.

Session assignment

Your work package will be to take 3-5 real-life projects and build them out in VOGSY from Quote to Cash. It’s important that your collection of test projects covers all the various engagement models that you have with your clients; time & material projects, fixed price projects, retainers and/or a mix of these.

Test 3 - 5 projects

Stakeholders

Results

Create an organization & a contact

Sales

Create an opportunity

Sales

Create an ‘Opportunity project’

Sales, PMO

Generate quote

Sales

Approval flow quote

Sales

Set opportunity to ‘Win’

Sales

Project creation (from opportunity or from scratch)

Sales, PMO

Project resourcing

PMO

Time tracking

PMO, Producer

Book supplier/purchase invoices on projects

Finance

Approval flows time entries and supplier invoices

PMO, Finance

Insert billing period project (when fixed price)

PMO

Generate a draft project invoice

PMO, Finance

Approve draft project invoice

PMO, Finance

Session 3: Reviewing your test projects

This session should last for about three hours.

Prerequisites

  • Previous session assignment finished

  • All agreed upon team members in the call

  • Questions/comments logged in feedback sheet

Matching your company’s reality to VOGSY

In the previous session, we mapped your business flows from quote to cash, as well as your project work breakdown structure to VOGSY’s settings and project structure. It is now time to review - in detail - whether there are any gaps in either your understanding of VOGSY’s logic or in the detailed settings of your own environment. Basically, the question that we answer in this session is; “If we go live with VOGSY today, would things work in the way that we intend them to work?”

We achieve this in the following two ways:

  • We address all questions and remarks that you had logged in the feedback sheet in preparation for this session.

    We receive alerts when you add queries to the feedback sheet. Wherever possible, we strive to review and answer those ahead of this session. Whenever you encounter a blocking issue, contact us immediately at VOGSY onboarding.

  • You ‘demo’ your test scenarios to us so that we can validate your setup and your assumptions:

    • Employees (roles, activities, rates, etc)

    • Opportunity (if in scope)

    • Quote (if in scope)

    • Project setup

    • Project planning

    • Resource planning

    • Project costs (= supplier invoices, if applicable)

    • Expenses

    • Invoicing

Session assignment: Populate VOGSY!

In order to prepare for the next session and for your go-live, VOGSY now needs to be populated with all your employees, organizations and their contacts, and most importantly - your projects.

So this is basically your work package for the next session!

First of all - reset the environment so that all your test data disappears. The settings you created will remain, no worries!

It’s important here to not go overboard. If you haven’t dealt with a client for 12 months, you might not need to enter that organization into VOGSY at this stage. The same applies to contacts. These can always be added later, when they re-emerge as opportunities. You can save work and time by focusing on your live projects. Who/what do you need to run VOGSY successfully right from the start? Stick to this and you’ll be live much sooner.

A quick word about live projects

VOGSY uses Opening Balances for projects that are already running. Using this functionality, you don’t need to ‘fake’ time entries to be sure that your project at go-live reflects both the original budget but also the current state of affairs with regards to what budget is now remaining. We advocate that you do not enter closed projects during onboarding. The same credo applies; if you don’t need it to help your teams to run their current projects - you probably won’t need it in VOGSY.

Session 4: Final steps to go live

This session should last for about an hour.

Prerequisites

  • Previous work package finished

  • All agreed upon team members in the call

  • Questions/comments logged in feedback sheet

Sanity check!

We can be brief; this is about checking whether all data is in VOGSY that you need to go live. Have we addressed all issues in the feedback sheet is another important final check. So we’ll go through that together. When this is all fine, VOGSY is ready to go live.

Session assignment: Getting you ready to go live

Now that your system is ready to go, there are a few things that you’ll need to have taken care of to make sure that your company is ready as well:

  • Announce the change internally, don’t forget the ‘why’ and how this will help the company

  • Invite staff members as users to VOGSY

  • Provide instructions around the usage of VOGSY

  • If there are any new procedures; inform your staff about their rationale and workings

  • Establish how people can ask questions as they start their work in VOGSY

  • Be sure that we at VOGSY know your exact schedule so that we can stand by

Session 5: Check-in when you are live

Should anything occur upon go-live and you need our help ad-hoc; we’ll be standing by so just contact us and we’ll help. More often than not, things go pretty smoothly and so it’s good to plan a formal moment to get together and talk through how things are going.

We like to plan this after about 1 month of your usage of VOGSY.

We’ll talk about things like:

  • User adoption; we can provide you some stats on this that might help this grow

  • Recurring questions that people ask and how to address them (in the product or otherwise)

  • Planning of functionality that was out of scope for this first go-live

  • Fine tuning reports as the data grows

  • And just sharing the joy of success!