Deciding whether you will take a strategic, or tactical, approach is fundamental to setting your project up for success.
While that may seem obvious, we have seen situations where clients have not considered this, and they have either over or undercooked their selection process. It is very important to make this decision up front, as it will influence your entire approach to selecting a solution, as well as the nature of the solution itself.
If you’re looking for a system that will be a foundation piece within your overall suite of applications, and will most likely need to be integrated to several other systems, then you’ll probably want to take a strategic approach. A solid decision that positions you well for the future, without having to replace the core system for many years, will be your objective.
This is quite different to a tactical selection, which is much quicker and easier to perform.
If your organisation is just starting up and it's unclear whether you’ll still be in business in 12 months or, if you need a system for a relatively short term, such as when you know the replacement of a legacy system is on the horizon and you simply need a temporary solution, a tactical selection may be perfectly adequate.
Strategic selections are typically much more risky, time-consuming, and costly, as there are wide-ranging technical and organisational factors to consider and usually more stakeholders and decision-makers that need to be facilitated through to a consensus. A thorough and robust process including extensive requirements gathering, business process redesign, RFI/RFP, formal assessment criteria with weightings and reference checking is usually appropriate.
Tactical selections have much less risk, as long as you make sure your key requirements are met, your people are looking forward to using the system, the cost is acceptable, and you have a solid exit plan if it turns out the situation changes and you want to take a different course.
A client of ours had been deliberating for some time over selection of a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system as they were just starting up in business and needed to track leads. They had fewer than 100 leads, no other systems except for the Gmail, Google Suite, and Zoom and yet were looking at options like Salesforce, Hubspot and MS Dynamics. The reasons they were looking at sophisticated systems were to handle multi-currency in their sales pipeline, and to provide data partitioning so that their in-market agents couldn't see leads owned by other agents operating in the same territory.
Pragmatically, they were trying to predict the future too much, and risked wasting their time and their precious start-up capital on licenses and implementation costs. We helped them realise that a quick decision for a basic solution would get them going, and they could make a bigger decision in a year or two. Their energy and funds could then be applied to actually growing the pipeline through marketing campaigns.
The solution we put in place was a bespoke Smartsheet lead-management and reporting application, that also included the basic multi-currency and data security functions they genuinely needed. This turned out to be a good choice as it was up and running quickly at minimal cost, and was extended later to handle inventory tracking, return & repairs, and deliveries. After 18 months, once the business was proven and profitable, and the team had a clearer view of their long term requirements, it was replaced with a more sophisticated Saas CRM solution.
Much effort and cost was avoided, once it was recognised that a tactical approach was suitable.
Deciding, early on, whether you are going down the strategic, or the tactical path, will make your whole system selection process easier to plan and manage, and avoid wasting effort and funding unnecessarily.
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