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.

When you’re making a large investment in a project management product or solution, you need to be sure that you’re making that purchase from a reputable vendor that will be there to support you in the future.

Obtaining a short list of happy customers that your vendor has helped – in other words, some references – is a common part of the buying process of many businesses. There is, however, a right way and a wrong way to check references. Are you doing it right? Are you getting the data you really need to make this critical buying decision? Or are you talking to one of the vendor’s own employees who is just pretending to be a happy customer? Sounds farfetched, does it?

As CEO of a software company, I have actually come across other software companies (one of our competitors, for example) that are guilty of pulling the references scam. The web allows companies to appear bigger and more successful than they actually are, because professional-looking websites can be created quickly and easily. They do not prove, however, that a company has been in business very long, or is reputable within its field.

Once again, checking references is extremely important because it enables you to verify that your vendor has had successful rollouts of their product rather than selling shelfware that will never be used. You also need to know that this vendor has experience helping customers like you – of your size, in your region and in your industry. If they have a customer similar to you in your city that you can
actually meet with, that can be the perfect reference. Think about it – if your potential software vendor is willing to lie to you about references, what else could they be lying to you about?

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Cloud computing has become incredibly popular in recent years, and its popularity is only going to grow. In fact, Journyx CEO Curt Finch & Resource Manager April Boland recently published an article in Accounting Software 411 Insider on the future of cloud computing and why businesses simply can’t ignore it.

PM World Today is also sounding the call with a new paper, “Cloud Computing Meets Project Management.” The authors, Raj Asava and Hussein Mzee, argue that cloud computing is beneficial for project managers, but must be guided by tried and tested PM principles:

From lost time to inconsistency, the lack of process & tools for managing projects will mean poor performance and an inability to harvest the true benefits of the cloud. The key to successful project management in the cloud era is to maintain the standardized project management framework that embeds best practices into how one manages projects, inside and outside the cloud.

The authors suggest that you harness the power of the cloud without forfeiting the processes that you’ve found successful in the past. This makes a lot of sense, though as project management continues to be influenced by the cloud’s innovation, perhaps methodology will be influenced as well.

Towards the start of the year, we blogged about the Project Times list of the Top PM Trends for 2010. Now Project Smart has compiled their own list, “More 2010 Project Management Trends.”

Drumroll, please:

• Enterprises Continue to Look for Efficiencies in Process and Technology
• Agile and Lean Processes are Overtaking Waterfall
• PMs are Becoming Independent Consultants
• Virtual and Independent Teams Will Be More Prevalent
• Social Media Will Become a Norm
• Project Manager and Business Analyst Roles are Converging

The overwhelming consensus is that technology is more significant than ever before in the business world. People are finding that they need to automate processes for increased efficiency in addition to transparency, visibility and communication. Agile is also taking over where waterfall software development processes used to reign.

How will these changes affect your organization? Have they already?

How do you kill a major IT project without looking bad or ruining your career? TechRepublic published a reader’s letter that asked this very question:

I can’t believe I let those guys at SAP talk me into adding a bunch of new modules onto this system. [...] This project is going to take an additional six months, and, worse, it’s going to cost us another $2 million. How am I going to tell the execs we’re in trouble, and we need to consider cancelling this project?

The reader was advised to understand that while she has professional responsibility for the success or failure of the project, she does not bear personal responsibility. It is also mentioned that IT project managers must be “the voice of risk management” from the very beginning, asking hard questions and ensuring that they are not getting duped.

Unfortunately, this situation is a common one. Most large scale PPM, ERP and other software implementations take multiple years and millions of dollars. The statistics say that even after all that, most of them fail. For this reason, many companies are looking for comparable benefits from smaller, more scalable solutions that require less upfront investment and risk. Why lose face (or your job) over a vendor’s failure?

By now, you have heard about Twitter, Facebook and other social media networks that are picking up steam. You may have read an article or two saying that you need to leverage these tools for marketing and sales, but how? Inc Technology has a new article that suggests that you find employees within your company who have an interest in social media. There are probably more of these employees than you think. Make sure that they understand your brand and strategy well enough to be trusted, then let them take on a project that is already in line with their interests.

What is your current social media strategy? Do you have one?

Speaking of which, we would love to interact with you and your business on Twitter and Facebook.

Can’t we all just get along? Especially CFOs and CIOs? CFO.com recently published an article highlighting the present challenges these often conflicting stakeholders face:

The need to align the mission of IT with that of the overall business has been a perennial challenge for both CIOs and CFOs, and efforts to do so often reveal a large perception gap between finance and technology executives.

In a survey conducted last fall by CFO Research Services, for example, there was broad disagreement over how well information systems support strategic-planning initiatives. Only 30% of the 100 finance executives agreed with the statement, “Decision makers rely on the IT function to provide the information they need to make strategic decisions,” but fully half of CIOs agreed. Similar disparities were revealed when it came to IT’s role in identifying new opportunities or business models.

One theory is that IT needs to work harder to provide metrics when they want to take on initiatives, and CFOs need to learn to take more risks.

Do your IT and Finance departments co-exist peacefully? What’s your secret?