11. February 2010 by admin.

There’s not much new in getting a successful project.  Here’s the latest list from BigNews Biz on how to implement Business Intelligence:

1. Focus on business processes and requirements. Often companies get tied up in the technical capabilities and ignore how you want your business operations to run and what your key business requirements are. Once you have this defined, you can engage in a more effective BI system.
2. Focus on achieving a healthy ROI (Return on Investment). This requires developing a high-level business case, establishing key performance measures, setting baselines and targets for those measures, and tracking performance after go-live.
3. Strong project management and resource commitment. Ensure you have a strong project manager to support and participate in the project.
4. Commitment from company executives. Besides support from a CIO or Director, support from the CEO and top management is also needed.
5. Take time to plan up front. Ensure things are done right at the beginning of the project rather than spending time to fix the problems later on.
   Ensure adequate training and change management. Help people to understand and effectively use the BI system.

Take out the references to BI and it could be any software project.

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7. February 2010 by admin.

Computerworld has quoted from a Panorama consulting report that shows how companies are saving money during software implementations in these recessionary times:

1. A decrease of over 20 percent from 2008 to 2010 is attributed to efforts to limit IT budgets and reduce implementation scopes in response to weak economic conditions. The tradeoff to these reduced implementation costs is that companies are less satisfied with their ERP investments than in years past.

2. Decreasing implementation timelines can be partially attributed to a weak economy which has forced companies to more tightly manage implementations. Further, a number of companies decreased the scope of their enterprise software initiatives.

3. The survey found that 54 percent of ERP implementations went over budget, a slight decrease from the 2008 data when 59 percent of implementations cost more than planned.  The finding is attributed to the fact that many organizations in the study failed to identify and budget implementation costs not attributable to software vendors, such as project management, organizational change management, hardware upgrades and the like.

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15. January 2010 by admin.

In a recent article in CIO, the topic of resourcing SAAS projects is discussed, with a focus on CRM applications.  SaaS (software-as-a-service, an aspect of “cloud computing”), you may recall, is where companies surrender aspects of their critical data to be housed “somewhere" else” and accessible via an application they do not own but merely rent only while the Internet connection remains available.  The author, David Taber, asks “if you’re using a SaaS CRM system, when should you be thinking about the implementation team as "staffing-as-a-service?"  CRM projects can represent a big investment of IT personnel.  Perhaps they too should be sitting in the clouds?

Taber concludes “Given the likelihood of change, even if your staff is extremely constrained, no part of the CRM work should be done entirely by outsiders. Your organization will need internal capabilities to develop and manage the system going forward.  That said, it’s also not a great idea to have major parts of the project done without any outside input. There are certain parts of the project that you don’t really want to get good at: technologies that provide you no particular leverage, or processes (such as data cleansing) that are incredibly boring or time-consuming. Consultants also bring valuable lessons from other implementations, and they can help you develop best practices in areas such as sales processes or Agile project management.”

A second section discusses on-going operational resourcing.  The article is called CRM Team Staffing Inside or Out.

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31. October 2009 by admin.

Henry Ford once declared that if he had only listened to his customers he would have built a better horse and buggy.  While listening to a customer is an important part of the effective product manager’s role, turning what he has heard into enhanced functionality needs a different skill-set than just listening.  The produce manager must be able to make the leap of how emerging software technologies may be able to deliver the outcome in an entirely new way.  What Henry Ford heard was his customers expressing a desire to get from A to B quickly, safely and cheaply.  He was able to turn that desire into a completely different transport paradigm.  The effective billing manager should be able to do the same.

Posted in product manager, tax billing software, vendors, water billing software | Print | 1 Comment »