3. April 2010 by admin.

The Register has a recent, chatty article about successful implementations – ERP (again) but the general principles apply.  Their first point goes to the heart of the services we offer:

It’s obviously necessary to define your requirements appropriately and select a package that fits. Indeed, one of the most prominent recommendations coming back from Reg readers is to minimise the amount of development work associated with customisations and extensions. You can only do this if you start out with a reasonable match between the software and your requirements. And of course when modifications to standard functionality are necessary it helps if the software you have chosen is based on an open platform that is easy to work with from a development and integration perspective.

Posted in software selection, resourcing, projects, vendors, water billing software | Print | 1 Comment »

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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