September 10th, 2025 • Brian Carroll • Reading Time: 5 minutes

Over the course of a 15-year career in SaaS software, I have been fortunate to participate in or observe dozens if not hundreds of implementation projects across a variety of industries. These collective experiences have helped me to identify the critical factors that can help a project succeed – along with the red flags that can lead to failure.  

In this post, I’d like to share some of those implementation experiences and provide some thoughts around the traits that are shared by our most successful customers. 

We need to consider two categories as we examine how to make an implementation run smoothly: Strong program governance and technical preparedness. 

Successful customers excel with the technical aspects of a project, but more importantly, have a strong governance structure in place that enables that technical program to succeed. 

Governance Success 

I have found that Aravo customers that operate with a high degree of efficiency and agility share several traits and habits: 

• Strong Executive Direction: Senior stakeholders are engaged and knowledgeable about the project. Their level of engagement promotes a collaborative environment and reduces the need for escalations. 

• Communication without Competition: Customers frequently require input from other parts of the business that may have competing priorities, budgets and timelines. Treating these things like organizational challenges to overcome, rather than competitive wins and losses, allows for cleaner decisions and less rework in the future. 

• Empowered Decision-making: Paralysis by analysis is a real thing, often resulting from a well-intentioned effort to make sure all participants feel that their voice has been heard. Empowered decision makers listen to these voices, but also quickly react with firm choices. If something needs to be revisited, that item is bucketed for a future phase in lieu of disrupting an ongoing implementation. 

• Connect Business Concepts to Software Functionality: Customer TPRM teams are experts in their internal risk programs and initiatives. Aravo’s implementation team are experts in configuring the Aravo platform to meet customer objectives. High-functioning customers are able to balance configuration level of effort against business need to make good decisions about where configuration should be customized (versus where internal practices should be adjusted). When a customer asks, “Can Aravo be configured to do this?” the answer is almost always “Yes.” However, “Should our Aravo instance be configured to do this?” is another important question, and one that successful project sponsors consider before confirming a final project scope. 

• Thing Big, Start Small, Grow Fast: Customers come to Aravo with the need to manage multiple risk domains, bring online multiple integrations, and manage change across business units and geographies. All of these things are achievable and are best served by a rational progression towards an end goal. Prioritizing implementation activities allows customers to start realizing positive ROI early in their journeys, while also creating flexibility in future phases as organizational needs change. 

• Demonstrate Success Internally: Successful Aravo sponsors champion their achievements internally and are viewed as an asset to the business rather than another expense. They define success metrics and then advertise their wins as they occur. 

Technical Success 

Alongside best-in-class program governance, successful customers also start their implementations with a high degree of technical readiness. That includes: 

• Platform Familiarity: The project team must have gained enough familiarity with the Aravo platform to make informed decisions about their configuration; where to customize it to fit business needs and where to conform to the recommended standards provided by our experts. This familiarity can be achieved through comprehensive self-guided trainings, or immersive workshops facilitated by the Aravo Customer Enablement team. 

• Integration Readiness: Integrations, both with internal systems and external data providers, should have been properly identified and explored. Internal teams must then confirm that they can meet configuration timelines, and appropriate licenses are in place with external providers. 

• Data Integrity: Third-party data that needs to be populated within the Aravo platform has to be defined. Sources should be in place, and the data cleansed with duplicates removed. Leveraging the Aravo implementation as a starting point for new, clean data leads to better outcomes, as compared to simply migrating all information contained within legacy systems as-is. 

Red Flags and Project Hazards 

Alongside the traits that lead to well-run programs, there are also notable attributes shared by customers that have struggled to get a program off the ground. Among them are: 

• A Disconnect Between Sponsorship and Operational Teams: Often, decisions made during the sales process are not fully communicated to the project team. A scope gets developed, and when implementation begins, members of the project team are surprised that certain things are not in scope, or that scoped items have been prioritized ahead of their area of expertise. Projects end up getting delayed as these things get sorted out, costing time and money. 

• Siloed and Noncommunicative Teams: Project teams require input from multiple places within the business. At times, business units or siloed risk groups are unable or unwilling to compromise, or struggle to make timely decisions. If stakeholders and leaders are unable to resolve these conflicts, programs can quickly become disjointed as different groups move forward at different paces. 

• Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen: Large, complex organizations have many stakeholders in a TPRM implementation. Customer teams that do not empower a smaller group of leaders to make decisions will find themselves struggling. Aravo’s implementation team will generally have 3-5 team members. If they are fielding daily questions and requests from a large number of customer team members, they will have a challenging time investing enough of their day into configuration to meet deadlines during the project.   

• A “Just Make it Happen” Attitude Towards Configuration: Customers that do not invest enough time in understanding how the platform works often struggle to understand the relative level of effort required of various requests, or their full impact. While Aravo configurers strive to say, “Yes,” at times, and when appropriate, they will call out when a requirement seems unproductive, ineffectual, or unwieldy. Customers that insist on fulfilling those requirements often struggle to maintain their systems over time when they have gone too far out of the bounds of best practice. 

• A Lack of Prioritization of Initiatives: Aravo’s platform helps our customers cover a wide array of risk domains, deep-dive due diligence and onboarding, leverage multiple languages, and output powerful reporting. It can be easy to get very big ideas about all of the things that Aravo can do (and to be fair, we can do a lot!), and it is also easy for those big ideas to be larger than budgets or timelines for a given phase can allow. Customers whose ‘must have’ priorities exceed their appetite for budget or timeline can have a hard time getting to the finish line. Similarly, it is important to remember that ‘perfect’ is the enemy of ‘good.’   

• Failure to Champion Internally: TPRM can require headcount, tools, and internal inputs, all of which cost the business money. If TPRM teams fail to highlight their accomplishments, senior leadership does not always see the value that their TPRM teams are creating for them. This, in turn, makes it harder to ask for additional investment in the TPRM program when it is needed. 

Conclusion 

The success of an implementation project derives from more than just fast and accurate configuration. It starts with a solid foundation of program support and governance and is supported by technical preparedness. Aravo’s Product Success team is happy to discuss any of these topics in more detail to facilitate the best implementation experience possible for our customers. 

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Interested in seeing how these unspoken truths translate into real-world success? Talk to an Aravo expert!   

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