Shive-Hattery Boosts Flexibility, Security and User Adoption with Vantagepoint Upgrade

In this series, we asked several customers to share their insight on their experience upgrading to Deltek Vantagepoint. You’ll see driving factors, tips for success, preparation best practices, benefits for end users, and more to help your teams learn from other firms like yours and empower your firm to successfully upgrade to Vantagepoint.

I recently talked with Rob Henriksen, the information systems administrator for Shive-Hattery, a Midwest architecture and engineering firm with 16 offices and more than 500 employees. Rob led Shive-Hattery through their upgrade to Deltek Vantagepoint in October 2020 and shared his perspective to help other firms successfully upgrade.

What were the compelling drivers for Shive-Hattery to upgrade to Vantagepoint?

One of the key drivers for Shive-Hattery to upgrade was that Vantagepoint is browser agnostic. The flexibility of accessing Vantagepoint from multiple browsers was important, especially because some of our staff uses Macs. As an IT leader, being able to use a more secure browser like Chrome is a significant advantage.

The project delivery teams also saw key advantages including planning at the labor code level, which gives our teams the flexibility they need when planning projects. And, by combining opportunities and projects in one place, a project can truly go cradle to grave in one hub.

Some other drivers were improvements in contract management and the combination of clients and vendors to keep the companies more organized in Vantagepoint.

What some of the biggest benefits your teams experienced after upgrading to Vantagepoint?

One of the biggest benefits of upgrading to Vantagepoint has been user adoption. Vision was a bit of a challenge to get people to understand how it works.

For some users, it’s the simple things like easily searching for projects that improves usability and is helping to increase adoption across the firm.

Now, I couldn’t take Vantagepoint away from our teams if I wanted to. That’s true for me too. After a recent acquisition, I was working through a Vision environment and it took some time to remember where to find what I needed. We just know where things are in Vantagepoint now.

What were some of your lessons learned from your upgrade?

• Test everything twice. There is inevitably something that you need once a quarter that you may forget to test and then you will be under pressure after go-live to make it happen quickly.
• Data validation. Make sure the data you have in your current environment is good. It’s the perfect time to clean out data and make sure your data is good.
• Phone a friend. We had a consultant available during our go-live just in case we ran into any unexpected challenges.

What advice would you give to other companies preparing to upgrade to Vantagepoint?

Embrace that the changes are good. Yes, Vantagepoint is different, but that isn’t a bad thing.

I recommend that firms take their time. This upgrade isn’t something that you should do in 30 days. It requires planning and testing. It’s critical to get a sandbox environment and start learning how it’s different than Vision.

This is a great opportunity to examine your processes. Just because you had a process for something in Vision doesn’t mean you have to do it the same way in Vantagepoint. You should also look at your workflows and determine if you still need them. In the sandbox environment, it’s important to try everything and that includes workflows. It’s not live data so you can’t hurt anything.

Finally, consider getting some outside help. There are consultants that can help your firm because they have been through the upgrade multiple times. They have a plan, they understand the potential gotchas and can help make your upgrade more seamless.

Who was part of your upgrade team?

Our core upgrade team had five people including our controller, director of project delivery, marketing information systems leader, an office manager and me from the IT perspective.

Our controller focused on testing the accounting processes and having all of the reports needed, especially for month end. The project delivery director worked through how projects would flow through Vantagepoint from the design phase to completion. The office manager was responsible for looking at the office side and billing to ensure they had what they needed for reports and everyday tasks. The marketing information systems leader addressed the CRM functions for our marketing and business development users. From an IT perspective, I focused on the environment, updating workflows, screen designer changes, reports, etc.

What was your upgrade timeline and how did you prepare?

As an on-premises company, we set up our own test environment and started to explore Vantagepoint. Then, our core upgrade team participated in the Vantagepoint Customer Assistance Program (CAP) program. After completing the CAP program, we had a pretty good handle on what we needed to do to prepare for the upgrade. We engaged with Aktion Associates, Inc. to ensure we had everything we needed for the upgrade. We had a spreadsheet that we worked through for testing, preparation and considerations to help us upgrade.

Our overall upgrade timeline was about a year with about three months of our own testing, then CAP and then three months of more intensive preparation with Aktion. We went live in October 2020.

What’s Next?

When we upgraded, we held back on some of the dashboards instead of quickly creating them in the upgrade process. We are now starting to roll out dashparts and dashboards through our communities of practice to put better information in front of our users.