CIO - Just the other night I was told of yet another horrid experience where a company, at the direction of the CEO, had bought a new technology (in this case Salesforce.com) and then spent a massive amount of money creating a tool the sales people couldn't use.
Not just wouldn't -- but couldn't -- because the consultants brought in to do the job never really bothered to engage sales during the design or deployment process. They then had to spend a massive amount of additional, unplanned funds to patch the result and create a solution that had at least some value.
It wasn't the product's fault. It was the complete lack of focus on the folks who would have to use this product. In the post-mortem analysis, it was found that the consulting company used a 17-year-old employee (perhaps someone's child or an intern?) to go around and ask some questions of the sales team, with the answers to be used to develop the tool. Clearly, this 17-year-old lacked both experience and context, and seems a blindingly poor choice to serve as a liaison to the end users.
Earlier this week, I participated in BMC's cloud workshop (PDF available here), which is uniquely designed to eliminate this kind of mistake. I think these workshops should be part of any major deployment and be driven by the company buying the solution. There are a lot of lessons here. BMC Cloud Workshop
BMC developed this rare offering after it recognized that the failures it was observing, both in product and in deployment, were coming from a lack of user involvement in the early phases of a project. The user engagement didn't seem to happen until the product was deployed and the users started complaining about it. This resulted in project failures and massive cost overruns, which, in turn, led to poor customer satisfaction and weak loyalty.
BMC's cloud workshop is a five-day process where the folks designing the solution and the folks who are going to use it sit down and jointly craft the overall architecture. This goes to the basic concept of measure twice and cut once. Put another way: Spend the time up front to work out what is going to be built, and only then move ahead to craft the solution.
I spent only a couple of hours in an abbreviated segment, but I feel that we probably demonstrated the mutual animosity that exists between line management and IT. But with BMC's help, we also found paths to common ground, and it is clear that working through this process before the solution is architected rather than during deployment is both far cheaper and much more likely to hit critical timelines. Secondary Benefits: Job Security
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