I think our two greatest challenges were:

1. User Resistance

2. Project Complexity 

User Resistance - Our project involved more than 100 branch office locations around the country in addition to our home office teams in San Diego. Our users are primarily financial advisors and come from a variety of backgrounds, age groups and levels of comfort with new technology. Getting everyone on board in our home office alone (about 30 employees) was a difficult task. Adding in 100+ branch offices made the project rollout and training program a tremendous undertaking.

Project Complexity - Because so much of our work involves multiple departments and multiple processing areas it was difficult to establish a manageable project scope. Every time we began to undertake an automated processing solution, it quickly became overwhelming. Laserfiche was a tremendous resource to us in this area, and the consultants that we worked with were absolutely amazing at listening to what our processes involved, what our objectives and outcomes and requirements were and helped us come up with the best ways to automate those processes. I often refer to our Laserfiche consultants as our "business processing therapists" because they really helped us to make the process manageable and it gave us some truly valuable opportunities to look at our processes and procedures as an organization at the same time. 

Was the process of adopting our ECM program easy? Definitely not.

Did it make us more efficient, more secure and give us better resources for managing our business processes? Absolutely.

In the end, the single most important factor in accomplishing our goals was to have the complete support of everyone involved - from our CEO to our COO to our ops teams and our project partners.