Software selection
What do you do if you are a small organization with no real IT shop and you need to select a software package? What if the software market doesn’t offer any solutions that fit your unique needs?
Most software selection projects start with creating a list of requirements and matching them to a list of software providers. If you are picking a financial management package, there is a set of vendors; if you a picking an HR system, there is a different set.
But out client was unique. There were no other businesses quite like it and so there was no obvious software package that would meet its needs. There was no long list or even short list of vendors to use in developing requirements. We had to choose from packages in completely different domains . . . domains that neither we nor our client understood very well.
So we created a new process for selecting a product that was less focused on scoring a list of packages against a laundry list of criteria and more focused on continuous iterations of narrowing down a wide field of contenders into a smaller subset. To supplement our (and our client’s) limited domain expertise, we contracted an expert in some of the software packages to use as a subject matter expert.
We took a process originally planned for 12 weeks and completed the selection in just six weeks by learning from features in related software to push to a small subset of vendors faster. Interestingly, the final package selected was not even on the original list, but came up about halfway through the process as detailed discussions shed more light on the variety of offerings in the market. We were able to get to the best solution for our client’s needs in a shorter timeframe than planned and then move them into negotiation and implementation sooner.
The project was so successful that it has changed the way we look at software selection and our approach to even relatively simple selections is now fundamentally different. Leveraging principles from agile practices, our approach uses weekly iterations to speed up the process and get to better results faster.
Note*: The details of the industry and size have been changed, but the kinds of deliverables created and the results are real.