By Adam Sandman, Founder & CEO of Inflectra
For companies dedicated to building great software and tools, statistics showing that almost a third of IT investments classify as failed or that organizations are losing billions of dollars annually because of botched software implementations are frightening. Software was supposed to eat the world: so why is it so hard to implement?
Many of the challenges of software implementation have more to do with people than with software. Teams don’t define why they want to use a piece of software (they tend to focus on features vs. actual use cases) and become frustrated when the application can’t do what the team wants. Even with the best planning and testing, many organizations gravitate to parts of the applications they are familiar with. They don’t fully utilize all the solutions’ features, so they aren’t maximizing the value of their software spend.
To address these problems, organizations rely on professional services to help with the deployment and implementation of software. Still, many are wary because of the unknown cost and scope of these services. The software industry has streamlined the discovery, exploration, purchasing and adoption of new software products, but there has yet to be a corresponding streamlining of associated professional services.
Organizations like Inflectra are attempting to take the unnecessary anxiety out of professional services engagements by offering a predefined set of business objectives, process consulting and training activities, and tangible deliverables provided at a fixed price to customers. The company also offers free workshops where customers can get technical assistance with real-world challenges from Inflectra’s technical support team and its developers and testers.
The benefits of this type of approach are many. Organizations can speed up and streamline their software rollouts and get faster time to obtain business value from Inflectra’s solutions. They also benefit from improving their processes at the same time as adopting the products. For example, using Inflectra’s platform allowed one customer to automate their software testing and enhance the quality of their requirements management process. In addition, adding the professional service offering enabled the same organization to develop the proper approach to improve overall product quality, reduce time to market and reduce software delivery risk.
Inflectra’s approach also provides value to the kinds of professional services organizations that many software providers partner with. Partners can work on more projects because of pricing transparency and work with and develop relationships with a larger pool of customers.
Even the easiest-to-use software products require a certain amount of change management. However, proper planning and execution and services expertise allow organizations to adopt those products faster and with lower risk.
