Journyx Project Management Blog

3. Find Out Who Will Be Configuring Your Solution

Is your vendor claiming that its solution does it all? Common sense tells us that those who do it all don’t often do it well. Those who specialize in a few core competencies, however, are in a much better position to excel. When a vendor claims it can do it all, ask specific questions about the functionality you need most (e.g. tracking actuals against project plans, resource allocation, etc.).

You should also ask about the team that will be implementing your solution. Many vendors will send IT staff, but do you really feel that an IT person with no experience in project management can implement and configure the solution to meet your specific needs? Ask vendors about the staff who will be providing professional services, and select one that has experts in both technology and project management on the team.

4. Don’t Be Fooled by Functionality

Functionality is another area where asking for customer references is key. A PPM vendor can promise you all kinds of fancy functionality, but when it comes down to it, will you really have 100 percent of it rolled out and used throughout your company?

A conversation with a few of the vendor’s clients should be able to answer this question for you. You shouldn’t be paying 100 percent of the price for a solution unless you know you will be getting 100 percent of the functionality.

Due to the economy, many businesses are now looking at project portfolio management solutions to help them isolate and execute mission-critical projects more effectively.

These businesses have also found that Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are both more affordable and easier to deploy than traditional ones. Choosing the right solution, however, can be challenging. Here are several ways to ensure that you choose the solution that is right for your business needs.

1. Consider Price

One of the first issues to consider with a PPM solution is the cost, especially during a recession when budgets are either tight or frozen. Larger PPM vendors have a cost of entry, and it may take a considerable amount of time to see a return on investment in such costly solutions.

What many organizations do not realize is that there are also strong vendors in the market with competitive pricing on project portfolio management solutions. Do your homework on all competitors in the marketplace before making a final decision.

2. Plan for Implementation

Did you know that it often takes as long as one to two years for a large PPM solution to be fully implemented? This means that the financial investment you are making right now will probably not bring in an ROI for a very long time.

Savvy buyers must press vendors for real answers on what the implementation time frame will be. It is also a good idea to ask to speak with other clients about their implementation experiences to ensure that the vendor delivers what is promised during the sales process.

• The Right Fit

Check the reference company’s website for business model appropriateness. Is this reference company similar to your business? For
example, software used by restaurants may not be appropriate for your project management consultancy. Are you a company that mostly sells to other businesses, or do you sell directly to consumers? Does your company handle many transactions and customers per year or just a few? The references that the vendor provided you should be as much like you as possible.

• Know Who You’re Dealing With

Call the reference company’s main number rather than the direct number of the person you were given. Find out if this is a real company with an automated company directory. When possible, get a receptionist to confirm that the reference executive works there. Tell them why you’re calling, and ask if they know who else might help in this matter.

• Double Up

Leave a voicemail message and send an email as well. For example, you can follow up your calls with a thank you email, sent to the address given to you by your potential vendor.

• Further Research

If you have any suspicions that the company isn’t real, use this website to see how long their domain name has been around, and who created it. You can also match up locales to area codes on Wikipedia in order to ensure that the reference company is really located where they say they are.

Beyond this, you need to find out how many phases the potential vendor had in the rollout of the software, what problems they encountered and what would have made things easier. Were all the people in the company as professional and easy to work with as the friendly salesperson? Were there any expectations set during the sales process that were not met during rollout and product usage? Are all of the functional areas of the software being used that they expected? Why or why not? Gleaning this data from the reference will help everyone involved to communicate properly, and it will probably convince you that you’re talking to a real satisfied customer – not a plant.

Any company can have one or two reference customers that are “friends of the family” – business owners that are too close to be objective about the performance of the vendor. This is why insisting on references in your location or industry is important, and why you need several to check up on.

If you follow these steps you won’t be hoodwinked by an unscrupulous vendor, and you’ll be much more likely to get a project management solution in place that will lead your company to greater business success.

And that’s a legacy we’d all like to reference.

So what steps can be taken to ensure that you’ll be learning what you need to learn about the entity you’re checking up on? How can you know their references are real and not somebody’s mother?

8 Simple Steps to Confirm Reference Validity

• Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You

If the reference calls you, be suspicious – who has time to do that? Tell him you are unavailable at the moment and schedule a time to return the call when he’s at his desk, at his company.

• Just the Facts

Make sure you are given a full name, title, company phone number and email address for all of the references that you will be contacting – at least three per vendor. Do not settle for Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo email addresses, or other temporary email addresses not indicative of a real company.

• Make the Call

You actually have to call all the references and talk to them. Sounds obvious, but most people don’t do it because it takes time and it is work. It is a very important step in the process, though, because you may be averting wasted money, time and effort for your company.

• Do Your Homework

Search on Google to ensure that the reference company is real. Does it match the Internet domain name of the email address given to you by your potential vendor? For example, if the reference company’s name is “Altman Architecture” and the email address is
bryan@altmanarchitecture.com, then do a search for that company name and see if www.altmanarchitecture.com is one of the top results you find.

PhoneMyPhone.com allows you to cause your cellphone to ring in order to escape a bad date or a boring meeting. “Oh man, sorry guys, I have to take this…”

I would never do this, of course.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Here in Austin, Texas, we have the luxury of proximity to the University of Texas (UT). From this well of intellect, we continually draw for ideas and young energetic labor. It is a well that never runs dry.

When I started Journyx, we were always broke. We hired one young lady, Sarah, who was working on her master’s degree in marketing, and she worked for us for years. She was very low-cost and she created our website, tested our software, and wrote our documentation. She was awesome.

We’ve certainly had our duds. But internships don’t have to last that long. You only ask them to stick around longer if they’re adding value.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Money is tight in times like this, and morale can get low. Know what Journyx CEO did a few years ago that really lit a fire beneath the salespeople? He told them that if they exceeded their quota by 33%, he would dye his hair the color of their choice. It was an incredible long shot. A totally safe bet. Soon the confidence of the sales staff was such that he decided to tell his wife about this great idea.

“You promised what?”

“Well, it was a long shot, honey. They’ve never…”

“Have you lost your mind. Dress silly. Do anything. But don’t screw up your hair!”

Then he got a series of lectures about hair chemistry and sure enough, he learned a lot.

But a bet is a bet.

Donna Fitzgerald, Research Director at Gartner, recently blogged about the Enterprise Project Management Office and its importance to the organization:

[T]he role of the EPMO is to help the organization make sure that strategy (real strategy, not just words on paper) is realized through investment in projects and programs. If you are tempted to say “Come on, Donna — that’s what we do now,” then you are either in the 5 to 10% of companies where it is true, or you are mistaking the concept of “strategic alignment” for strategic realization. One says I’m somewhere in the general vicinity of the strategy — the other says I have direct line of sight to the strategy and can tangibly show how this project or program contributes.

She emphasizes that this model is different from what you might have read about EPMOs – it is “small, lean, mean and agile.”

Do you have an EPMO? How does it perform in terms of helping you to reach your strategic goals?

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Related stories:

TechNewsWorld: Why Should We Let Your Department Live? PMO Survival 101

Harvard Business Review: The Execution Trap

Project Times: Getting Strategic Projects Off the Back Burner

InformationWeek has published an article on how to implement an analytics methodology for better decision-making.

Decisions made based solely on intuition, gut feelings, and years of experience, while valuable, tend to be less effective than scientific methods. Analytics provides a methodology that incorporates crucial variables and provides simulations that show the impact of our choices before we implement them.

The steps include:

1. Define the problem
2. Identify relevant factors
3. Focus on data collection and preparation
4. Model the solution
5. Report the results
6. Implement the decision
7. Follow up

Does your current decision-making process include these steps? How could you implement them in order to enhance what you’re already doing?

We at Journyx would like to wish our friends in the United States a very happy Independence Day. Hopefully you have today off from work despite it being the 5th of July. For those of you who don’t, we won’t make you read the typical project management and business improvement content.

In a meeting last week, a Journyx manager brought up the story of the American Revolution. The British came out, all lined up, with better equipment and better numbers, and the colonists, who were shooting from behind trees, won the day. The lesson here is that perhaps you don’t have the strongest sales numbers right now. Perhaps morale is down from having lost employees and clients. Perhaps your company is concerned about the new challenges that will come when the recession is over but all top-line growth strategies were cut last year.

Not to worry. Keep fighting. A great woman once quoted Arthur Ashe to me, and it still resonates: “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” It’s not the time to lie down and give up. It’s the time to take responsibility for your company’s welfare and success, regardless of your level or role. Step up and do something you can be proud of!