It’s beneficial to state and have vendors understand your fundamental project objective and procurement goals:
Provide an understanding of all in-scope, start-to-finish business workflows (the “As Is” or “Future State” business processes to be supported by your new software solution) and to what extent current or re-engineered processes have been documented. Provide any documentation that lists process descriptions and business rules or, in the event this is unknown, describe your organization’s willingness and expected process to define these important system design and configuration elements.
Whether your organization chooses to undertake a business process re-engineering (BPR) exercise as part of its business transformation or simply stays the course with its business “as is,” process and business rule documentation can be presented in the form of data models, object models, process workflow charts, or step-by-step grids or tables. A listing of all the distinct and unique workflows to be implemented, including the names of the different business processes, process types and/or workflows, is desired to enable accurate costing.
“Use Case methodology” is a recognized process definition/documentation best practice that lends itself especially well to a regulatory environment, and which will result in documentation that could be readily interpreted by COTS and/or Custom Application Development software vendors as they seek to understand system requirements described in a subsequent RFP.
The Use Case approach is primarily workflow-centric and, therefore, valuable to regulatory agencies undergoing transformation. Ultimately, when the time arrives, up-to-date documentation of your Use Cases will allow software vendors to understand your capability-oriented system requirements in the context of the in-scope business processes that will remain “as is” and those that have been improved through re-engineering.
Other Desired Information about Your Business Scenarios
NEXT WEEK: Your reasons for software system change and your critical success factors.
As we have stated in the previous article in this series, implementing a new COTS software system, with its own best practice, oriented functionality for common regulatory activities will likely require a willingness by your organization to change some of its current operating procedures. Doing so may even require a modest organizational re-design of some business units in order to better align with industry-leading best practices as implemented in the chosen COTS solution.
Let’s face it: change can be uncomfortable and stressful for some. In our experience, the best way to manage that discomfort and stress is to skillfully control how you navigate the changes.
Organizational change management (OCM) is a framework for managing the effect of new or altered business processes, or changes in organizational structure or culture, within your enterprise as a result of implementing your pre-configured COTS software. Simply put, OCM addresses the “people side” of change management.
At Computronix, we encourage our prospective customers to consider properly resourcing and planning for structured OCM activities as an integral part of their COTS project.
The outcomes of a successful OCM and/or organization re-design experience will include:
As you can see from the previous comments, clearly there are some steps your organization can take to improve its chances of project success. When it comes to client project team skills, your project team will be successful with individuals who have training and experience in the following:
There are, of course, other important roles that will participate in the project. These include business Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), trainers, and various IT specialists (for data conversions, system interfaces, web content management). Executives/sponsors should also plan to participate at a Project Steering Committee level of oversight.
NEXT WEEK: Achieving a true and complete understanding of your project scope as driven by your fundamental objectives and goals.
Pre-configured Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) regulatory software products, including our POSSE Permitting & Licensing System and POSSE Alcoholic Beverage Control systems, are developed based on a vendor’s experience with, and a best practices interpretation of increasingly uniform business processes, such as government-oriented licensing, permitting, inspections and enforcement. The increasing commonality of these regulatory processes from jurisdiction to jurisdiction across the U.S. and Canada enable COTS software vendors and their customers to move away from high-risk and expensive one-off “custom build” software projects to pre-configured business systems that featuring significant available functionality.
To achieve a successful COTS business system implementation, your agency will need to be prepared to collaborate on several important tasks, including:
As you further consider a typical COTS system implementation paradigm, even in your project’s infancy, it should cause you to seriously evaluate such underlying factors in your organization as:
As you can see from the above statements, an executive sponsor-driven objective to streamline, improve business, leverage new technologies, and realize improved efficiencies–as well as an organizational willingness to change how you do business in order to get there–are fundamental considerations for a successful COTS project.
NEXT WEEK: A look at the outcomes realized from an effective approach to Organizational Change Management.
This week we conclude our series on ‘How to Deploy a Digital Government Platform’ with a summary of the concrete steps you can take now to turn information into action.
You can lead the charge for your government agency and be one of the very few to master enterprise project delivery if you’re willing to insist on two critical requirements.
The sobering statistics conveying the frequency of failed IT enterprise projects continually reinforce a harsh reality: this is an endeavor that only a few can consistently do well.
Once you embrace that reality and commit to your own participation in becoming one of the talented and ambitious few to pull this off, it becomes absolutely essential to identify a prospective project vendor with a verifiable track record of consistent achievement in this arena. This is done, not to absolve or largely remove the client from project participation, but rather to empower project stakeholders with a proven product solution and delivery process that has consistently validated itself with each-and-every successful implementation—without fail.
In focusing your energies in exacting detail on choosing a project vendor with an extensive history of project delivery excellence, a demonstrably superior service culture, and a fully realized product solution with generational longevity, you are bringing both a winning team and the winning playbook to your project. Now your project risks are reduced to the internal factors directly within your control, and because of your chosen vendor’s confirmed expertise in both service delivery and culture assimilation, you can rest assured that your vendor’s proven best practices will guide your internal project teams over potential hurdles as you achieve the common goal of 100% project success.
You can lead this charge for your government agency and be one of the very few to do this well and you can approach this challenge with justifiable confidence that the project will be an unmitigated success if you’re willing to insist on two critical qualifications from your platform implementation partner:
Find a partner that’s never failed in this endeavor and verify that assumption through a comprehensive investigation of their client projects. Pursue this path and you are placing your own career on a firm foundation to become one of the very few that do this well. Better still, you will play a vital role in delivering transformative technology that will improve the lives of your colleagues and citizens for this generation and the next.
So, how do you start?
Next week, we’ll conclude our ongoing series on How to Deploy a Digital Government Platform by showing you the key steps to take to guarantee delivery of your technology project on time and on budget.
When it comes to core infrastructure investment, perhaps no factor is more important to consider in your project planning than the attributes this infrastructure will provide your organization in terms of long-term product stability, growth potential, and future upgradeability.
Properly sourcing and successfully implementing a government software platform that meets all of your current agency requirements is undoubtedly a career building move. However, sourcing and implementing a solution that becomes indispensable infrastructure for this generation and the next, that is a career ‘defining’ move.
From both an operational efficiency and citizen services perspective, the optimal scenario is a robust toolset and service delivery model that maintains leading edge functionality over the entire lifecycle of the software platform whilst eliminating the taxpayer burdens associated with forced obsolescence and eventual replacement. The key to achieving this win/win for administration and citizenry alike is restricting your vendor selection criteria to include only those vendors committed to substantial longterm R&D reinvestment in their product suite, with an accompanying product roadmap confirming a development path that ideally aligns with your long-term strategic goals.
More than simply an abstract expression of dollars committed to R&D in the future, what you’re most interested in assessing in this area is historic efficiency of spend and commitment to ongoing
product refinement as quantified through the following:
Next week, we’ll continue our ongoing series on How to Deploy a Digital Government Platform by showing you how to ‘Set a goal for 100% referenceability and project success and not deviate from this objective.’
Given the scope and complexity of modern governance processes and workflows, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify a software solution that can meet or exceed all your project requirements within a single integrated platform—but it is worth the effort.
As the pace of innovation is increasing, so too are the demands for government enterprise software platforms to do it all – particularly in a modern government setting where citizen calls for improved engagement are clashing with the inevitable realities of budget constraints.
To respond to this appetite for solutions that ‘tick all the boxes’, enterprise software providers with more limited platforms have responded by going on a buyer’s spree of mergers or acquisitions to build out a solution that more adequately reflects the needs of the marketplace. While laudable in its pursuit of full feature functionality, the downside of this approach is it often results in poorly integrated software platforms that represent significant challenges in terms of their capabilities for facilitating cost effective implementation, performance, stability and upgradability.
Given the direct impact it can play on both the success of your project implementation as well as the long-term viability of your governance platform, a core aspect of your product evaluation should therefore focus on a comprehensive evaluation of the product pedigree as scored via the following attributes:
Next week, we’ll continue our ongoing series on How to Deploy a Digital Government Platform by showing you how to ‘Evaluate the vendor’s product roadmap to ascertain longterm partner stability and project viability.’
One of the key aspects that separates successful project implementations from the disappointments is the degree of compatibility that exists between client and vendor. In failed projects, internal client teams often feel as if they’re ‘going it alone’ with communication from the vendor often feeling sporadic or even evasive. By contrast, with successful projects, the vendor implementation team often feels like ‘part of the family’ with communications provided in a timely fashion and consistently adding value to the process.
As always, frank and open discussions with current and past customers of your prospective software solution vendor(s) will provide the most revealing insights here. In seeking these truths, it’s important to not confine your conversations to C-Suite or Technical Lead contacts only, but rather to gain perspective from a broad sampling throughout the organization—from key project stakeholders through to frontline end users of the software suite.
Whereas the accumulation of this type of qualitative customer data was once fraught with dead ends or unanswered calls, the ubiquity of career centric social media such as LinkedIn empowers a process that makes it possible to achieve a representative survey quantifying vendor partnership traits and culture compatibilities in an easy and expedient fashion.
A sampling of some of the questions you might ask include the following:
Again, it’s important to emphasize that this process will only appear invasive or prohibitive to a potential vendor IF their customers have core dissatisfaction with the project implementation, their software platform, or their customer service approach. Satisfied customers will be happy to sing their praises and similarly, an implementation vendor that places a high degree of emphasis on partnership and culture traits will prove extremely cooperative in facilitating your investigation of same.
Next week, we’ll continue our ongoing series on How to Deploy a Digital Government Platform by showing you how to ‘Quantify your potential government software platform as a truly integrated solution.’
The 5 Keys for re-imagining citizen engagement with transformative technology:
Best practices guidance from an industry leader with an unmatched 100% project success rate.
It’s frankly perplexing that with a procurement process as robust as the standard RFP Process for government clients seeking enterprise partners, that the final result is so often a mismatch between client and vendor. However, as a cogent study of ERP project success factors reveals, a key contributor to this issue is the inherent bias of an RFP process that skews more favourably to quantitative scoring of product feature matrices as opposed to the more qualitatively measured—but no less critical—project success factors of implementation methodology, service delivery capabilities, and product lifecycle optimization.
The good news is there is a better way to evaluate your potential implementation partner by focusing your investigation beyond product fit predominantly to include a handful of core company indicators:
Focusing your software implementation evaluation too narrowly on product suite ‘features and fit’ can result in overlooking the more crucial attributes of project acumen, service ethos, and support capabilities, that will ultimately define your vendor partnership and, as a result, the success of your project in meeting and exceeding your business goals.
With this in mind, let’s commence our ‘5 Steps’ countdown to drill down in detail on the crucial steps you must take to ensure you have a legitimate ally in this enterprise with a verifiable track record.
At their core, enterprise IT projects are exercises in multi-variable problem solving with those who do it well recognized by their ability to think on their feet and stay committed to final project success despite the challenges and obstacles that will inevitably arise.
For this reason, it is imperative that you are rigorous in your investigation of your prospective software vendor’s partnership qualities and team culture, as best quantified by their relationships with current and past customers. You want the best, or at the very least, the best within your budget. With that in mind, here’s the types of questions you should be asking of a potential vendor in seeking these key partnership abilities:
While this latter point may seem harsh or invasive, it’s important to emphasize that vendors that are truly excelling with their client services approach will not balk at this request, but rather will heartily invite your frank discussions with their satisfied customers. Good vendors produce a trail of happy and loyal customers.
Conversely, ‘vendors’ who are not wholly invested in your project’s success past the sale and initial implementation are revealed via the following traits:
The service commitment of your chosen vendor and their willingness to fully integrate within your teams’ culture is a mission critical factor in determining the success of your government IT project. For that reason, taking shortcuts in this area of your evaluation or worse, failing to set the highest standards for service commitment in your selection criterion is the single biggest error you can make in finding your perfect vendor.
Remember, only a few can do this well. For that reason, you must set and maintain the highest standard for performance to ensure you separate the many that do not excel in their service delivery model. It’s one thing to build an excellent product. You’re also looking for those rare vendors who can work with you as a true consultative partner with a service ethos that can sustain over the many years demanded of core governance infrastructure.
Next week, we’ll continue our ongoing series on How to Deploy a Digital Government Platform by showing you how to ‘Consider your software vendor’s partnership qualities and their fit with your culture.’