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

Effective knowledge generation


Effective knowledge generation first starts with gathering the right information. It also means leveraging multiple channels in order to gather information. In the case of defining business requirements, information gathering should be an iterative process where each iteration refines the scope of your investigation (discovery). For supporting effective knowledge generation, we need to perform the following tasks:

  • Gather

  • Review

  • Refine

  • Relate

Gather information

First, your information gathering approach should be in alignment with the implementation scope. Asking questions outside the area of interest is a waste of time and effort, and may cause confusion for the customer. Second, in order to understand the information that you receive, you need to understand the context of that information. A suggested approach to gathering information is to start at the business solution level and then drill down into the existing components that support the business solution....