Consultancy project with Datel, 2025 to 2026
Getting a finance team ready for Sage X3
Datel, a UK Sage partner, brought us a live problem: a private-equity-backed events business needed to move its finance operations from Sage 50 to Sage X3 within 5 months, outside its busy season.
- Context
- Consultancy project
- Client
- Datel
- Year
- 2025 to 2026
- Team
- 4 consultants
- My role
- Project planning, the pitch, the readiness engine and the prototype
The problem
The technical configuration could hit the go-live date. The real question was whether the business could. Fixed go-live dates leave little room for customer-side preparation, so a gap can open between the system being ready and the organisation being able to use it. With years of Sage 50 data to clean, a finance team new to Sage X3 and no clear owner for the change, that gap was where the risk sat.
How we diagnosed it
We used POPIT (people, organisation, process and IT) to map where readiness was likely to fail, the 5 Whys to trace those failures to a root cause, and current-state process mapping of the implementation process. The root cause was structural: there was no continuous process for managing readiness across data, stakeholders and adoption.
What we proposed
The Predictive Readiness Accelerator, a two-pillar approach:
- Human-centred governance. A guiding coalition of Change Champions inside the business, based on Kotter’s Accelerators model, to own accountability, run phased process sprints and keep governance tight.
- A technical readiness engine. A readiness dashboard fed by two tools: automated data cleansing with mandatory human validation, and role-based micro-learning that builds the team’s confidence before go-live.
We costed the pilot, modelled the return and set out KPIs, a risk register and a roadmap for turning the approach into a repeatable offer for Datel’s customers.
What I did
- Led project planning and the final pitch to Datel’s leadership
- Designed the technical readiness engine, including its feasibility and usability analysis
- Built the work breakdown structure, KPIs, competitor analysis and POPIT assessment
- Created a finance-manager persona to keep the design anchored to the people affected
- Wrote the executive summary and conclusion
- Coached my teammates, all presenting in their second language, on pace, posture and holding the room
The pitch
We presented our recommendations to Datel’s leadership in May 2026. When the panel asked whether we’d enjoyed the project, the grins around the room answered for us.
