The platform is chosen and the people who have landed it are few

The business case is approved, the platform is chosen and the systems integrator is signed. Then the program director role goes to market and the shortlist comes back thin. The finance functional lead everyone recommends has just extended. The people who have taken S/4HANA or Dynamics 365 live in Australia turn out to be a small group, most of them already working, and a fair number employed by the integrator you have just engaged.

Nobody mentioned this during vendor selection, and it is the hiring problem under every enterprise platform program.

Why the pool is thin

Most of the experience sits with the systems integrators. An SI consultant might do four or five implementations in a decade; an in-house person does one, perhaps two, then runs the platform they built. So the people with repeat cutover experience are overwhelmingly on the SI side, billable and shielded by the engagement you have just signed.

In-house people who have done a full cycle, design through cutover and hypercare with the decisions theirs rather than the integrator’s, are rare. Many joined at build or arrived after go-live to run it. Neither is the same as having carried the cutover.

And the same names move between programs. The contract bench is largely known and it moves as a bench: a program director brings the architect and the integration lead from last time. If your program starts in the same quarter as two others in your city, the bench has usually already chosen.

“Worked on” and “landed” are not the same credential

Someone who has landed a platform can tell you about the cutover weekend: the go/no-go criteria, what was red on the Thursday, who made the call. They can tell you which legacy records they chose not to migrate and what the business said six months later. They can tell you how long hypercare ran, what broke, and when the SI was allowed to leave. And they can tell you about the business process owner fights, the finance lead who would not give up a bespoke approval chain.

Someone who has worked on a platform will describe their module and their deliverables. Not the same thing.

The seats that matter most and are hardest to fill

Six seats decide most programs. The program director owns the pace, the sponsor and the SI relationship, and the pool who have done it twice at scale in Australia is very small. The solution architect holds the end-to-end design and says no to the business and the integrator in the same meeting. Functional leads for finance and supply chain carry the fights with the business process owners and need both the module and the industry. The integration lead is scarce on every program, because the interfaces to the legacy estate are where the schedule is lost. The data migration lead is the seat sponsors underestimate and then cannot hire two months before cutover. The change lead is the easiest to fill on paper and the most often filled badly; the ones who have run adoption through a cutover are a much smaller group.

How the contract pool behaves

Rates are set by the program cycle, not by the individual. When several large programs are in build at once, rates for the scarce modules rise and people are harder to hold; when programs finish in a cluster, rates ease. Extensions follow the phase: people who join at design tend to be extended through build; people who join at build are extended through test if they are on the critical path and released early if they are not.

The risk sponsors miss is the bench that moves on at go-live. If hypercare and the handover to a run team depend on the people who built the solution, contract and price that dependency from the start, not in the last month.

Permanent, contract, or the hybrid most clients land on

A pure contract program is fast to stand up and leaves the business with a platform nobody inside it understands. A pure permanent program takes too long to hire and asks people to join for a cycle that will end.

Most clients settle on a permanent core and a contract bench. Permanent in the seats the business must own after go-live: the platform owner, the solution architect if you can secure one, the finance process lead and the integration capability. Contract around them for the phases that peak. The hybrid works when the permanent core is hired first, so the bench reports into people who will still be there when it leaves.

How to brief and assess

Brief the seat, not the module list. Say which phase the program is in, whether the budget is approved through go-live, who the SI is and how that relationship is going.

Assess for the landing, not the exposure. Ask for the cutover story in detail, including what went wrong on the weekend. Ask for the decision they got wrong and what it cost. Ask how they managed the SI and when they had to escalate. People who have landed a platform answer with specifics; people who have worked on one reach for generalities by the second question. Take references from the program director or sponsor they worked under, not only from the SI partner who may want to sell them back to you.

What the process looks like with us

For the leadership seats, retained search: a brief written around the program’s real state, a market map of who has landed this platform in this industry, and an assessed shortlist with the cutover stories tested and referenced. For the contract bench, we draw on people we have worked with before across programs, so the recommendation comes with what they were like under pressure, not only what their CV says. Most of the people we introduce were not looking when we rang.

If the brief is asking for people who do not exist at the number on the table, you hear it in the first week and we decide together whether to move the number, the brief or the timing. More on how we work with employers.

Questions clients ask