Packaged software functionality will never exactly meet the customer's existing software expectations. Packaged software is designed to meet a broad set of common business requirements for a particular market or industry. 2 While tradeoffs are common in any "software" engineering endeavor, tradeoffs in this case are driven by the desire to leverage components from the marketplace. This is a change in philosophy that not only the project team must make, but also stakeholders and end users, if real adoption and acceptance is to be obtained.
Successful packaged software implementations are those implementations that are able to balance tradeoffs, resulting in minimizing the Total Cost of Ownership and maximizing organizational acceptance. The first step in finding this balance is to understand when to negotiate on business requirements. The second step is to lay the groundwork for effective negotiations. This effort includes sending a balanced message (impacts, opportunities) along with...