“Your goals are the road maps that guide you and show you what is possible in your life.” –Les Brown
No truer statement has ever been written. In fact for any challenge in the World, be it in business or in life, all you need is a map to navigate your way around it. A plan. An understanding as to how to get from point (A) to point (B) in the most effective way possible. When considering enterprise grade software the philosophy should be the same! Why create more work for yourself if all you really need is to construct a plan and execute against it? And surprisingly I speak with individuals every day who are entering into an evaluation of an Enterprise grade software void of any plan at all… My goal in this piece is to provide a would-be evaluator with a series of guidelines to define a clear path and hopefully prevent you from spinning your wheels…
First: Define your Plan –
It’s easy enough to come up with a list of requirements in tandem with your colleagues and put them on paper, or maybe you’re simply imagining the way you believe things should be and are kicking tires to see whether your ideas are validated? Either way the effort will be time consuming and, simply for starting to look, it’ll also present you with a truck load of new information and undoubtedly uncover a number of items you’ve not even considered yet. For example:
- Have we carved out a budget? (It’s remarkable how often this detail is over-looked)
- Is the budget being considered as a capital expense or an operational expense?
- Will the application be hosted internally, or can we utilize cloud services to host the software?
- What other resources will be involved in this process? (IT personnel, would-be users, Executive visibility)
Failure to answer these basic questions could see you collecting a ton of data and making headway toward whatever you may need, only to then learn you’ve been working needlessly because there will be no budget, no resources, and no motivation by anyone who would provide feedback. I’m not sure about you, but I have a hard time remembering what I had for lunch. Simply saying to yourself that you’ll come back to it in a year only means you’ll be starting the project all over again at that time.
Second: Map your Route –
It’s simple enough really. If you need to navigate the seas of change you define your plan and then you set a course. The course can often be deviated from, perhaps adding in a waypoint here and there as needed, but the end gain is the same. You’re working toward reaching a goal. A destination. A Map!
On any map the effort is to provide a starting point and an ending point while perhaps having a number of points of interest in between. In a software evaluation there’s really no difference. The starting point is identifying that you need to travel at all. That’s to say, you recognize there’s a problem that requires a solution. At the end of the day your efforts then become around getting to a solution for that problem. Simple enough. So start there…
- Identify the problem and lay out a list of items to address it
- Create a checklist for those items
- Research software vendors who would address those (Risk Management, Quality Assurance, Daily Log, Mobile Application Availability, Analytics and Business Intelligence)
- Select three to five vendors to evaluate
Begin your evaluation by providing the exact same criteria to all the selected vendors. You should expect your criteria will change vendor to vendor regardless, just based on their own strengths and weaknesses so be sure to start everyone off on an even playing field.
Third: Get Moving –
If you’ve completed steps one and two, then step three should be pretty easy. It can even be fun! The leg work is done and now you’re simply measuring the vendor against your requirements. It’s as though you’ve written the script and now the auditions begin! Of course, there are a great many factors at play beyond just the technology, and so in considering the vendors you’ll begin to take into account several other intangibles as well…
- Does the vendor meet our technology requirements? This is obviously the most important question to answer, though there’s a lot to be said about who you’re doing business with as well
- Does the vendor’s culture match that of our own? If that sounds trivial to you, it shouldn’t. Expectations are set early in the process. If you end up with an unresponsive sales-person, you should expect the same from the organization.
- Is the vendor reputable? Be sure to ask the vendor about user stories, case studies, testimonials, and of course references. Validity in the market place can be huge in understanding the overall undertaking of the project and the experience others have had working with them.
- And finally, what’s the vendor’s long term partnership strategy? This can be an absolute deal breaker! Be sure you know what the level of support and maintenance will be ongoing, as there may be expensive contract renewals or worse, NO support in the out years. This also feeds into the first point of understanding the organization’s culture.
If you complete these three steps then you should be well on your way to improving the overall performance of your organization per the software you select while saving the company money in the near term! After all, all you need is a map!
About Shane Yerkes
Shane is a creative, entrepreneurial-minded sales executive with a focus on start-up and growth based software companies. With a consistent track record of exceeding revenue targets, He attributes his success to a very simple business philosophy; Solve real business problems through the solution, never sell for what's not there. Google+