One of the most critical mistakes made in deploying technology is not sufficiently involving staff in the process. Technical professionals tend to lose perspective of the purpose of the technology they work with and forget the fundamental principle that:
technology must be applied and adapted to meet the needs of people; people should not be applied and adapted to meet the needs of technology.
There will always be learning by people required and some adapting to doing things differently. But fundamentally technology should, to the greatest extent possible, accommodate the needs of the people expected to use it.
Therefore before committing to any final purchases or systems, ensure you have tested the proposed solutions against your own reality.
This applies primarily to the software you are selecting, but could equally matter if some completely unfamiliar equipment is being considered.
So, for example, before having Open Office installed on all your work stations, have it installed on one of them and have the staff who will actually be using the software work with it for a few days. Have them take notes on the problems they experience and the functions they wanted but could not find.
Similarly, with solutions that cannot be reasonably installed for testing, arrange access to an existing installation or online demo. This might be the case, for example, with accounting software such as SQL-Ledger. While it is free and so there is putatively no cost to testing it, the process of installation is reputed to be the most complex and testing part of the entire software experience. If that is the case, then it would be wasteful to go through all of that installation effort only to discover during testing that the package does not meet your needs.
In such instances find a local site or online experience available that your staff can work with to find gaps or even outright failures. Constantly map the staff experiences back to your original reasons for wanting the technology and use those experiences to reveal new or modified possibilities.
Whether open source, or commercial, actively expect to be able to communicate and ideally visit with businesses that are already using the solution. Ask about their experience and gain from their learning.
If you cannot do all this on your own, ensure that you have consultants who will do, and do it without bias. That is, do not have as your consultant the same people who want to install, support or sell you the product. (You can always ask Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. .)
Of great importance, NEVER stop using existing solutions that are getting the job done until after you have had the proposed “upgrades” running in tandem for a reasonable period of time.
Millions of dollars and millions of hours have been lost when businesses buy a new solution to replace an out-dated, unsupported or difficult existing solution. This happens to some of the largest corporations on the planet. The error is that, because they know they have done their homework; they have asked all the right questions, visited existing installs and had their own computer geeks approve the new system; because of all that they let the vendor install the new system and switch off the old one.
Inevitably it goes wrong. Tweaks have to be made, custom code written, a new piece of hardware to accommodate some unique demand of the software and so on and so on. We have seen this process happen many times. In several instances, the failure to insist on tandem installs resulted in literally years of custom work having to be done to make the replacement function as needed.
So. Keep your existing system running. Have the vendor install the new solution along side your existing system. Have the new system run with real data, from the previous day if necessary. Make it go through the actual processes and transactions that will be executed moment-to-moment. I.e run it live.
But don’t let it anywhere near your actual business until it has proven itself stable and reliable. Keep using what works well enough until you are sure the cure is not going to be worse than the disease.
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