Book Image

Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations

By : Grady Brett Beaubouef
Book Image

Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations

By: Grady Brett Beaubouef

Overview of this book

Using packaged software for Customer Relationship Management or Enterprise Resource Planning is often seen as a sure-fire way to reduce costs, refocus scarce resources, and increase returns on investment. However, research shows that the majority of packaged or Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations fail to provide this value due to the implementation approach taken. Authored by Grady Brett Beaubouef, who has over fifteen years of packaged software implementation experience, this book will help you define an effective implementation strategy for your packaged software investment. The book focuses on Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) implementations, and helps you to successfully implement packaged software. Using a step-by-step approach, it begins with an assessment of the limitations of current implementation methods for packaged software. It then helps you to analyze your requirements and offers 10 must-know principles gleaned from real-world packaged software implementations. These 10 principles cover how to maximize enhancements and minimize customizations, focus on business results, and negotiate for success, and so on. You will learn how to best leverage these principles as part of your implementation. As you progress through the book, you will learn how to put packaged software into action with forethought, planning, and proper execution. Doing so will lead to reductions in implementation costs, customizations, and development time.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Maximize Your Investment: 10 Key Strategies for Effective Packaged Software Implementations
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
Preface
Summary of Challenges

Enabling decision makers


It has been my experience that decision-makers will not make a decision until they have some level of confidence in the outcome, and they are comfortable with making the decision. One criteria is objective, and the other criterion is subjective. I have found that when decision-makers have a competent understanding of the packaged software implementation, they are more comfortable in making decisions. The following sections will focus on best practices for building a competent understanding for decision-makers.

Project on-boarding

A reality in any packaged software implementation is that decision-makers will come and go during the implementation. The challenge is to be able to quickly bring in new decision-makers without a major disruption to the overall project momentum. The traditional approach is to create documentation to a level such that anyone can review it independently, in order to integrate themselves into the project. This documentation style is overkill...