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It’s a hackneyed, overworked, inelegant maxim. But my God, it’s a good one: every dollar spent in planning saves five dollars in implementation.
Put In the Effort
Too many folks operate under the misguided notion that they can secure the best results for their businesses without investing much in preemptive effort. They believe an afternoon spent gladhanding and hanging in front of a handful of vendor demos will provide them with all the data they need to make an informed choice about what often proves to be a pretty hefty IT spend.
Or they issue a standardized call for quotations on a project whose multiple features and fiddly requirements are not given nearly their due in the process—and then suffer the consequences.
Do they really think publishing an RFP or even hiring a business analyst who knows nothing about the intricacies of their operation is going to result in a successful, on-time, on-budget implementation?
Ridiculous.
The traditional approach to orchestrating an IT software installation within an office is altogether too shortsighted to generate as much of a business impact as it could. Historically, SMBs make IT purchases without enough focus on improving those key business processes that occupy the lion’s share of their corporate existence, or that possess the most potential for profit.
How We Can Help
At 360, we don’t waste our time cherry-picking what software will work in a particular organization, but concentrate on identifying the things that engage its participants in a day-in-the-life kind of way.
Reality always trumps theory.
And through our Business Impact Workshops, IT Health Checks and IT Road Maps, we guide clients along a more comprehensive path that invites them to identify their big-picture corporate goals and objectives, and align them with current, rooted-in-truth business strategies.
What’s more, where an organization will typically charge its IT department with the task of finding a new ERP, CRM or even VoIP system, our 360 Business Impact Workshop redirects and redistributes the responsibility, so that everybody has fingerprints on the murder weapon, as it were. From the CEO on down, each employee is engaged in an overhaul that will, after all, have fallout for them all.
Together, we work to discover an organization’s pains and the options for alleviating them.
Inside of this, we explore what factors are driving the need for a new system. We ask how we can improve customer service, increase productivity, lower costs, boost revenue and so on.
And we question what might happen to a company if it made no improvements at all.
The final selection and implementation of equipment, when pursued inside of this strategy, translate into a material impact on the business as a whole. Wandering along the thin path that begins with identifying a company’s functional challenges concludes merely with influence on the particular project in question.
A measly thud where you could have heard such thunder.
A dollar spent that could have paid you back fivefold!!