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

Best Practice — Implement to the current maturity level


The approach of implementing to the current business process maturity level of the customer creates a healthy balance between technology, business processes, people, and project risk. It focuses on minimizing the impact to the component (people) , and maximizing the impact on a business solution. This approach also puts the project team in a position to reap early success. In the following sections we will outline the key benefits with this approach.

Minimize evolving business requirements

Managing evolving business requirements can be a significant challenge in any implementation, and can present a significant risk. Let's briefly examine the key drivers for evolving business requirements:

  1. 1. Requirements support customer-facing, revenue-generating business process.

  2. 2. Requirements support a new business activity for the customer. The customer has no organizational history or an agreed-upon business construct to derive requirements.

It...