A customer, with a very large physical records database, recently asked us for references for other sites that had digitized their records so he could copy what they did.
We explained that unfortunately, that approach doesn’t work because:
1. The other customers aren’t interested in a long term ‘free’ consultancy exercise helping him to determine his requirements; and
2. In our experience (over 34 years) every customer’s requirements and culture are different and each customer requires a unique and personalized solution.
Its back to that time-honoured common-sense approach that says,
“You can’t solve the problem until you first know what the problem is.”
There is no shortcut to doing the job properly, professionally and appropriately (to match the culture of the organization).
Our Approach
First, we begin with a face to face meeting where our experienced consultant asks a lot of questions about the organization, its structure, its data, its objectives and its timeframes. Then our consultant comes back to our office and engages in a second discussion with our expert team, reviewing our findings and coming to a considered consensus about the best way forward. This is followed by a short report to the customer summarizing our findings, conclusions and recommendations. This is the initial working document that the customer can then review and discuss internally with all stakeholders.
So far, all this is at our cost and comes under the heading of pre-sales.
The customer then usually says something like, “We have discussed your report and are in agreement about the best way forward with a few changes. What is the next step?” We respond by proposing a more formal onsite consultancy, at the customer’s cost, where our consultant interviews the key stakeholders and gathers all the information available about the customer’s records, standards and business processes. Out of this exercise we are able to produce a detailed report and project plan for review by the key stakeholders.
It may take several iterations of review and edit before all parties are satisfied that the detailed plan is appropriate, cost effective and doable. We then produce a formal proposal that includes everything agreed and await the customer’s approval and go ahead.
What does the proposal include?
· Ordering of any hardware required
· Installation of any software required
· Administrator training of key operational staff
· Pre-implementation consultancy, finalizing how we handle all data and work processes
· Capture and conversion of existing records from multiple sources, ‘mapping’ the data to our products
· Implementation consultancy, making all the changes required to the data model and business processes in our products
· Report production, modifying standard reports and creating new reports
· Trial run of any conversions and data uploads
· Review of configured products, data model, business processes, reports, converted data, etc.
· Approval
· Final configuration changes
· End-user training
· Live conversion and data uploads
· Go-live
· Post-implementation consultancy (usually 3 to 6 months later). Did we achieve our objectives?
How long does it take?
In our experience, from start to finish can take from 3 months to 24 months. The main cause of a longer time-frame is how long it takes the customer to make a decision on our proposal. Another lengthening factor can be any complicated integrations that need to be designed and tested.
The actual implementation usually takes from 2 weeks (a very small site) to 3 months (a very large site).
Is every customer implementation really that different?
In 34 years we have never seen two identical implementations. Every implementation has something unique and each implementation uses a different mix of software, tools, training and consultancy to meet its objectives.
There is no substitute for determining your unique requirements in detail and there is no other way to do this other than by speaking to all stakeholders and by involving all stakeholders in the decision-making process. As my ex-partner used to say, “it is just work!”
References:
Sample Project Plan
EDRMS options with RecFind 6
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