It has been estimated that between 50 to 90% of all asset management system software implementations fail. Software implementations are notoriously difficult but the question that should be asked is why?
According to a recent story a county government walked away after spending $30 million dollars for an asset management software implementation after an independent consulting firm concluded that fixing the problems with the implementation was not worth the cost.
The funny thing about it was that no one wanted to take responsibility for the disaster. The county blamed the well known consulting company hired to oversee the project, the consulting company blamed the client and the software vendor took the position that they had nothing to do with it.
In actuality, they are all equally to blame. More importantly, the software vendor and 3rd party consulting company have damaged themselves as credible institutions because they failed to set adequate customer expectations. Failure to realize that the setting of customer expectations before a project begins as well as adjusting them during the course of the implementation will almost always spell doom.
Why Expectations are Important
All asset management system software implementations have multiple points of failure. In general, it is these failure points that provide the basis for the expectations that need to be set. Therefore, expectations should include but are not limited to:
- An agreement on the scope of the project including who will be involved and what they will be accountable for (includes client, vendor and consultant). It should be noted that everyone from the decision makers to operational staff are accountable for buy-in. Without buy-in from all levels of the customers organization, the new asset management software system has very little chance of being used properly.
- A listing of customer objectives and the vendor response to how those objective will be met.
- How much customization is needed and what is the cost.
- Problem escalation procedures to make sure unresponsive technical support or operational staffs do not prevent issues being addressed on a timely basis.
- Who completes the gathering of asset detail as well as the time frame to gather. Asset detail may take months to gather properly. Will facilities staff have the time to put together the asset information or will this take way from their regular duties?
- The amount of training to be done, who will attend, who will conduct and realistic results. Ineffective and inadequate training will result in lower system adoption rates, greater end user resistance to using the system as well as lower system utilization. Why purchase a Ferrari if you are not given the keys to operate it?
- Setting benchmarks of success. How will the client know the system is working as promised or is on schedule before thousands if not millions are spent.
- The management of Dragons. A Dragon is a person who is being resistant to the change that is occurring. The most common reasons for the emergence of dragons is fear. Left unchecked dragons spread negativity, decreasing buy-in and lowering the chance for successful implementation.
- Making sure operational teams from both the client and vendor/consultant are empowered to make changes and obtain buy-in.
Defining a Successful Implementation
If the customer is unhappy with the end result, then the implementation was not a success. This may go against conventional thought that if the software system works the then the implementation was a success. But I disagree, a successful asset management implementation goes beyond the now as an unhappy customer means no referrals, bad word of mouth, very little chance they will repeat (return) as a customer or in this case, a lawsuit was brought for damages.
Successful implementations leave the customer happy with the value of what they paid for. Vendors wanting to grow should not plan to meet customer expectations, they should be planning to exceed them even if they make use of a 3rd party for the implementation. The customer is always King, exceeding customer expectations makes it a lot easier to keep customers and sell new ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment