Three tips to avoid becoming our customer

Three tips to avoid becoming our customer
  1. Make sure you understand your business processes before you ask someone else to automate.
  2. Ensure that your partner wants to understand your business processes.
  3. Have an evolving User Adoption Plan. This is a long term effort.

We’re a specialist firm focused on rescuing struggling Custom Software and Dynamics 365 implementations.
We truly love our customers and we believe the world would be better if companies like ours didn’t need to exist. Let’s work together to make that happen.

Here are 3 tips that can help you avoid becoming our customer.

Know your business

When building automation into your business it’s vitally important to understand your business processes (and all edge cases) before asking your development partner to automate them. Only when you truly understand your business can you build automation that works the way you expect it to.

Companies that fail to fully understand their business before starting a software automation project (which includes Dynamics 365 implementation) often find that what they end up building does not match the reality of their business.

Realizing the need to change the software after it is built can cost up to 150 times the cost of understanding and planning ahead. Your most important work is to make sure you understand your business and can explain it to others who may know nothing about how your business works. Not always an easy task!

Work with an interested partner

Many partners are happy to do what you ask but not all of them will take the time to understand your business. When you choose to work with a partner who blindly implements what you ask them to do you may save a few dollars at the expense of an architecture that doesn’t match the realities of your business.

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

Phil Karlton

One of the most important pieces of building any software system is to ensure that the relationships between different types of data are modeled after the real world. If you work with a partner who doesn’t take the time or make the effort to understand your business, you miss out on this critical component of your system.

What you might end up with from a partner who isn’t invested in you is a system that looks like it works but because of how it is internally implemented, does not work in a way that will fit your business. Always choose a partner who takes the time to understand why your business works the way it does.

User Adoption is a journey

One of the most overlooked areas of Dynamics 365 implementations (and other software systems) is User Adoption. That is, the process of bringing new users of the system online and helping them be effective with the tools they’re given.

There are many different types of people in the world and your organization and userbase will contain a wonderfully varied mix of them. Do you have a plan for helping them understand what you’ve built?

If you aren’t lucky enough to have an internal “champion” who’s taken on the role of guiding new users you’ll need a plan that helps those who are new to your platform come up to speed. This area, above all others, is one of the most difficult challenges of the implementation of any software system.

Nick Hance
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I'm a software project rescue specialist who has been rescuing failed software systems since 1999. President of Reenhanced.
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