How long is your sales funnel?

In a recent discussion with a mortgage broker, he told me that he is making a good income, but he couldn't predict his revenues more than 3 month out.  This makes it difficult for him to plan.
In questioning him further on his sources of prospects, I found that although he has a good understanding of where his prospects come from and how to nurture them, he has no process for nurturing them.  So although he knows the type of prospect he is looking for, he doesn't track what makes him successful at nurturing and turning that prospect into a customer.
This is a common issue for most small business people.  Their focus is on today and making today's transaction successful.  They have no time to focus on future prospects.  They are too busy handling today's issues.
In this specific situation, the solution is to outline what it takes to turn that prospect into a customer.  The business knows what the actions are.  The problem is that they are too busy handling today.  The solution is simple:

1. Define the actions.
2. Define how you would measure the outcomes (How do you know that the prospect has changed stages?)
3. Outsource the activities to a virtual admin (This includes the measurements).  With a few simple activities, the cost will not be high.
4. Monitor the results.

This will take some time to develop the plan.  The monitoring will take only a few minutes a week.  Every new contact needs to be classified into the stage that they are at as they come in.
This process will help you to develop and extend your capacity, your number of prospects and sales and increase the revenue stream.

The 3 problems of small businesses

In a recent discussion with a small business banker, he identified three problems faced by most small businesses. They were:

• Cash flow
• Planning
• Staffing

In my Blog entry last week, I mentioned the problems from Quote to Cash, where many small businesses don't generate invoices on a timely basis.  If your only costs are time, and you have enough money coming in, then late invoicing may not be a big problem, and will not have a big impact on cash.  But if you have materials to buy, cash flow becomes a big problem.  You can at least reduce that problem, by issuing invoices on a timely basis.
Next week, I will describe a common problem that I have encountered with some small businesses who see having time to generate invoices as a problem.
Planning is the second area identified by the banker.  Often planning is what people do when they are not busy reacting to the challenges of reacting to day to day business issues.  Planning should outline what you want to achieve, so that you can focus your time on the important issues.  If you don't plan, you tend to react to business issues as they come up.  You focus on what's urgent versus what's important.  The key is to identify what is important to you, and spend your time on activities that help you get there.  That is what planning is all about.
Staffing is the third area mentioned.  As small business owners, we have a challenge finding staff, who have the skills necessary to do the job.  We can't afford the very skilled, because they are too expensive.  We hesitate to use specialists, because they are too expensive.  So we hire junior people and tell them what we want.  We then have to tell them over and over and they don't seem to get it.  What's wrong with this picture?  When we get into business, we start with a specialty and learn that we have to do many other things.  Most of these things are difficult to delegate to junior staff and we end up doing it ourselves.   Who is the busiest person in the office?  The owner.

All three of these problems are process issues.  I will provide some insight into solutions in my next few posts.

For anyone who reads this, if you have other problems as a small business owner, please let me know.

From Quote to Cash

Many small businesses suffer from the quote to cash cycle.  With many small business owners that I talk to, who work IN the business, delivering products and services, there is always a challenge to balance workload.

You work hard to get a sale, then work hard to deliver.  In many cases, these jobs are back to back, with a need to start working on the second, the minute the first is completed.

With a build to suit approach, which is where many small businesses start, a lot of time and effort is spent doing a quote or estimate.  Once the sale is made, all focus goes into delivery.  When the job is finished, you start to work on the next one.  Many times, you are too busy to create the invoice.

Most people might say "generating the invoice is the most important part!".  I always felt that, and was surprised at how many businesses don't do it immediately.  I found, surprisingly that many people are focused on delivering the next job.  They react to business critical items, such as paying their suppliers and their staff (or they can't do new jobs), but are very slow to pay themselves.  They often defer creating the invoice until they "have time".

In analyzing the situation with clients, I found the challenge.  Most of these owners hate paperwork and love doing the work.  They don't work at simplifying the paperwork, because it doesn't come easy to them.  They often create complex processes and tools that makes the job hard to do.  Yet they have done all of the real work, they just haven't made it easy to use.

A common example that I have seen is the generation of quotes or estimates in Excel or Word, the generation of the order form in a different product, purchase orders created manually, then invoicing again using a different tool.  Each of these often requires entry of customer information, product information, prices, etc.  Since there is no link between them, the data is entered multiple times.  In many cases, the same information in the quote is again used in the invoice.  Then the data is entered in the accounting program.  To save time, only the basic accounting entries are entered.

The result is that the business is able to do financial statements at the end of the year (often late), but has no understanding of the profitability of products or customers.

A simplified business process would capture the information once at the beginning, provide the ability to generate order confirmation, purchase orders and invoices simply, as well as save time, give you better information about your business, and get invoices to your customers faster.

Sounds like a winning proposition to me.  Why doesn't everybody do it?

An evolving business

I started my career in Information Technology and went from programming software, to planning data centres and networks.  In managing data centres, I learned that effective operational processes were critical to delivering consistent quality services.
As a consultant for 13 years, I started by improving IT processes in large data centres as The IT Process Doctor, to working with smaller businesses who were not getting value from their IT investments, as The Virtual CIO.
In my previous Blog entries, I blogged about IT.
Recently, I found my true passion, helping small businesses to operate more successfully, by eliminating the complexity in their business, so that they can improve productivity and eliminate many of the frustrations that they encounter in the activities that we all must do to success in business.
The approach to simplifying a business is rooted in simplifying operations through the development of consistent processes that continue to deliver day after day.
Every person who becomes adept at any skill operates on a subconscious basis.  The more you have to think about an activity, the slower you are.  The more you operate at a subconscious level, the more productive you are.  If we simplify activities, people can move more quickly to a subconscious level.
That's why change causes so much disruption.  When you change a set of activities, you have to think about what you are doing, and you slow down.  This can be extremely frustrating when you have to be really productive.
Over the next few weeks, I will be blogging about approaches and ideas to help small businesses improve their performance.

Increasing software project failure rate

Software project continue to have an increasing failure rate according to a Standish report. Standish regularly reports on the success of software projects. This year shows a decrease in success.

While more and more emphasis is placed on project management for the failure, I believe that the real reason is a lack of business value definition. In too many cases, projects get initiated with a good and valid business reason, but the "solution" is seen to be the installation of software. Software is a tool which can help a business improve, but it is not a solution by itself.

More effort needs to be placed at the front end to determine the real goal. The real goal might be to increase sales, reduce costs, improve cash flow, improve quality of service. By using a software product the business may be able to capture and analyze data more quickly and easily, deliver goods more quickly, etc., but the software will not do that. It can help, but if your business process is ignored, you may end up creating more problems, more quickly. That doesn't help reach the business goal.

Start by clearly identifying the business goal, then show how the goal will be achieved. When you see what steps are required, you can identify where software can help. After you have decided how the software can help, don't turn the project over to IT for implementation. Keep focused on the goal, which should deliver business results, earlier rather than later.

If there is something in the project that doesn't produce business results, you will learn that earlier and be able to adjust the deliverables of the project to ensure success.

Key issues in CRM software failures

I attended a town hall meeting today on IT failures specifically targeting CRM. The key items mentioned about the failures all related to not It and non-software issues. Some of the key items that I took away included:

• Software comes with the vendors version of best practices. This may not be your company's view of best practices. Converting to their best practice could hurt your results.
• For CRM in particular, attempting to get information on what your best salespeople do is a problem. If you ask them what they do, so that you can copy it, then watch them, you will find that they don't practice what they say. This is true of other professions, but it may not have the same impact. Most of what people do is done subconsciously. That's why what they say and what they do is different.
• Many IT projects fail because they try to do too many things for too many people. This increases complexity and increases opportunity for failure.
• Because of the defined complexity, the application becomes difficult to navigate and decreases productivity and sales. It's better to make it simple.
• There is too much emphasis on training vs. education. Training tells you how to do it. Education helps you understand why you should do it and how that will help to improve performance. There was another question related to how much training should be provided vs. making the software intuitive. Would anybody play games if they required you to attend a full day training session?

Those were my key takeaways. You can check for more on Twitter at #ITfail.

Top Ten List for CIOs

The Chief Information Officer title has been around for some time now. The title is often used to describe the person who heads the Information Technology function for a business. While this is normally true, I believe that this title should be restricted to leaders who recognize the value that Information technology should be providing for a business.

Too many CIOs are still "managing the business" That is, they are responsible for all of the technical staff and hardware and manage the day-to-day operations of the IT business. While this is a necessary function, it doesn't add value.

The Society for Information Management (SIM) have completed a study of CIOs and came back with the following list of priorities:

1. Business productivity and cost reduction.
2. IT and Business alignment.
3. Business agility and speed to market.
4. Process re engineering.
5. IT Cost reduction.
6. IT reliability and efficiency.
7. IT Strategic planning.
8. IT innovations.
9. Security and privacy.
10. CIO Leadership role.

The focus here is clearly on the business and not on IT as the driver. This says one of two things: Either the CIOs polled are taking action or at least the message is getting through.

In the past, too much of the focus has been on Reliability and efficiency (#6) or on Security (#9). While these are important, they are what the IT operation needs to deliver. The CIO needs to be focused on the business.

See Top Ten Presentation.

A view of a failing software project

I have just read an article about a CRM project that is doomed to failure. The basis for the problem is that, buyers often utilize the customizing features available in many software packages to change the functionality before they understand what the software does and how it works. Utilizing the software out of the box is what the writer recommends.

While this may not be possible for all software buyers, it raises an excellent point. Software is developed to automate a process. If you start to change the functioning of the software without understanding the basic operations of the process, you are doomed to failure.

The answer may not always be, use it out of the box without changes. However, understanding the underlying process is critical. A better approach would be to document your existing business process and compare it to the process provided by the software. This does two things:

• It provides you with a basis for evaluating the software and identifies opportunities for improvement of the existing process and what you can get from the software.
• It will also tell you whether there is a conflict.

Now you know exactly what you need the software to do and whether any enhancements are required. If there are no critical missing requirements, I would agree: Use it out of the box without customizing.

You will get results earlier, and if customizing is required, you will get a bump up when the system has stabilized and your staff are up to speed.

The original article can be found http://bit.ly/47lzRv

What's the difference between an estimate and a quote?

I've been working with a small organization that has to replace it's software.

They have no idea where to start, so they came to me. They want to understand what it might cost them. Before the Board of Directors will approve any expenditure, they want to know the full cost.

In talking to a number of software developers and software suppliers, I found them initially reluctant to discuss potential costs. In their experience, the clients seldom have any idea what it takes to develop and install software. If the supplier quotes too high a price, the client will go elsewhere. If they quote too low a price in order to keep their interest, they get burned when the client comes back.

The problem is that the business needs a starting point. They need to know if it might cost $1 or $100,000. They want it for the lowest possible price. That is a ball park estimate. However, since they have no idea what is required to develop and install software, and the software supplier has no idea what's functions are required, they can't give a quote. No matter what they say or do, the client will see the estimate as a quote.

We have a standoff. The supplier ask for a budget, but the client is trying to create one.

The reality is that we need a third party, who understands that software is an automated process, and in order for the supplier to be able to give a quote, he must understand much more about the business. By acting on behalf of the client, he can get to understand the scope of the business need, without getting any value from the price of the software.

In this case, I have been able to get three estimates from different suppliers, despite their reluctance. They knew that I understood the difference, and they are not providing the estimate to the client. I am. Now I have to make sure that the client understands that this estimate will help them decide how to move forward. As we define the process and identify the requirements, we will be able to get a reasonable quote from the supplier.

What's the business value?

We can't run our businesses without the use of technology today. New technology related projects get started every day. Yet studies that have of project success continue to show a poor success rate.

Most of the emphasis within IT, whether by internal groups or by IT suppliers focus on what the IT group or supplier delivers and not on business value. Yet business value is the priority for the business.

In this week's post at value delvery management, Jed Simms talks about the business case and the fact that it is two things: a contract and a strategy. Between them, maybe we get the value we should always be getting.

See Jed's article.

Is buying software an emotional experience?

I've spent time in software development as well as implementing software for a variety of business functions. One of the things that I always found strange was that most technical people that I worked with, had their favourite software product. Trying to implement new software was always a struggle. One person wanted to use his favourite product, and another wanted a different product. It had nothing to do with requirements, it had to do with experience. People wanted to use what they were comfortable with.

I've seen this many times, and I also understand it. When I believe that I can get the job done using one software product, I have no interest in trying another. As a past software developer and as a business person who has repurposed many software products, I also know that most software today is flexible enugh to do many jobs, if you can define what you want, you can probably do it.

When there is no current software product, and something new must be purchased, I have a logical approach that I take. First define the goal. The define the process that will reach that goal. Then identify whether a software product will help the process to meet that goal. I know this works and have used it many times.

Recently, I have seen business owners look for solutions by assessing website information on various software products (not a problem, it is one of the steps). Then they get comfortable with a software product, without having defined their goal or understood whether the software will help them. Since I am someone who likes a structured approach, I understand why they feel more comfortable (they have spent some time learning about it).

What confuses me is that the level of comfort becomes a decision point. They think the only way to learn more and get results is to buy it. And often nothing can change their minds.

The opposite side is also true. When someone has a bad experience with a software product, there is often nothing that you can do to show them how they can get all or most of what they need from their current software. The decision has been made, even though the costs of installing new software may be 5-10 times of keeping the one that they already have.

Maybe, I'm wrong. Maybe buying software is an emotional experience.

Does your website provide value?

I am working with a not for profit organization that needs to replace the software that they are using. The software was developed for this international organization many years ago and now is supported by one person on a database that has not been upgraded for many years.

As part of the assessment, the organization wants to put together a budget, so that they understand their costs before they start to spend money. As a result, they don't want to do a detailed evaluation of the software at this time, they just want to project the costs.

The approach that we have taken is to estimate the costs with as little effort as possible and as little interaction with the supplier as possible. This has meant using the website information whenever we can and only ask very specific questions which can be answered simply. This won't be a perfect projection (too many projects undertake a detailed analysis, thereby expensive) before creating a budget.

This is the first time, I have done this and it has given me a new understanding of what a website should provide. In the past, I have been frustrated by websites that lure you in with a promise of information, then require you to sign up, so that they can market to you (As an aside, most of them ask for this, but never follow up). This slows the process down and if you are not ready to talk to a salesman, gets you to look elsewhere for answers.

In this investigation, I found the following types of websites:

1. Some that provided very little information other than being a sales brochure, asking you to contact them for anything that would really tell you about functionality. Most, however, would give you technical specs.
2. Some provided a lot of functionality information, but very little in terms of education about what you need to prepare for.
3. Some that provided functionality, technical and educational information, but required you to sign up to get much of it.
4. One that provided all of the above with no request for signup. It provided a lot of information about what not for profits need to look for, why they should manage it and options for getting it. This went way beyond their software. It was a pleasure reading it and it helped us put together a better proposal.

I worked with a business coach a few years ago, who told me that I should be providing educational information, so that people could understand how I could help them. I now understand what I need to do with my website to increase the value that I provide.

The Missing Link to CRM Success

Customer Relationahip Management software has a very poor success rate. Numerous stories have been written about their failure to deliver on anticipated results.

I found a BLOG entry that describes 12 steps to a success CRM Implementation. The list of items is valid for most proojects of any type as well as CRM, but there is one missing element.

The first step says "Calculate the Value". This step is important, but it is not good enough as a statement. Having the value calculated will help you to justify the initiative, but it won't tell you how you will achieve the value. The typical problem is too much of a generalization. This is the source of failure from most software implementations.

Generalizations are made about how benefits will be achieved. Then after implementation, nobody understands why the value was not achieved. In some cases, it's because some activities were cut to reduce the costs of a project. These activities are the ones that provided the most benefits.

In order to prevent this, you must focus on the "HOW". How will the benefits be achieved? This means loking at the details of your operating processes, and showing how the software will be of benefit. Not only will this provide the definition of value, it will also show how the value will be delivered. The HOW will show up, not only in the business case, but in the activities of the project, and every member of the project and the operating team will be able to see it.

Cost problems will not cut the value, because in cutting out activities, you will automatically know what benefits you will be cutting.

To see the full list of other steps, see "

12 Steps to a Successful CRM Implementation".

Problems are simply opportunities in disguise

Most of us run our businesses on a day to day basis, dealing with customer needs and solving problems as they arise. As our business changes, as our custmer needs change, "problems" arise. Often, as business owners, the need to deal with these "problems" consumes much of our day. These "problems" are simply flags that tell us something is not working as it should. We cannot afford this to be normal operations.

When we are up to your neck in alligators, it is difficult to remember that we are there to drain the swamp. But as a business owner, that is what we must do.

The flags are telling us that something is not working properly. By understanding the source of the problems, we have the opportunity, not only to fix the problem, but to prevent it, thereby saving us time in the future. If we go further and understand the source of the problem, we may identify that there is a new need from our customers that we are not satisfying. This is the real opportunity. By satisfying this new need, we may be able to improve our relationship with our customers, because we are "listening".

Our business is not static. It is constantly changing. Our customers needs are changing. Our business processes must evolve along with those needs.

Software Procrastination

Procrastination is something we all fall into, at least from time to time. Why do we procrastinate? Does it matter?

A recent experience with a client provided me with answers to these questions.

The client was a small organization that had acquired software from a related organization many years ago. They didn't have a lot of sophisticated needs, so they stayed with it. Over time the related organization replaced the software, but still had one person on staff with the experience to support it.

Problems developed on a regular basis. Some of them were described as quirks that required a person who had experienced all of the quirks to prevent them. Support was expensive. They had to fly someone in from the US to fix problems.

They knew that they needed to replace the software, but had no one on staff with experience and didn't know what they needed to do. They researched alternatives, but that only served to confuse them. They continued to defer.

Finally, a few months ago, they had a major problem. While one of their staff was on vacation, they encountered one of the quirks. It caused a major problem that required 3 months worth of cleanup at year end to recover.

That created the incentive to take action. In one planning session, we were able to develop a high level plan, provide a basis for justifying replacement, and give them some level of comfort about moving forward.

That raised a few questions for me:

• Why do we procrastinate? Is it because we don't know what to do next?
• How much time are we wasting when we procrastinate? We think about it often, but unless we are taking action, the thinking is wasted and stressful.
• Why does reseach not help? If we know nothing about a specific area, do we actually waste time by doing research?
• Why are we afraid to ask for help from a specialist? Is it because we need to feel in control and are afraid of it costing too much money? Perhaps spending a little with a specialist who helps us plan, without requiring a long term commitment from us would provide value.
• Are the specialists the problem? Do they expect a long term commitment and are they not willing to help put us in control?

All I know is that a lot of time (and time is money) is wasted in procrastination. I, for one, will have to look at my own procrastination differently in future.

6 Myths about buying software

Buying software for a business can be a real problem for small businesses. Many small businesses put off buying until they feel "comfortable" with the decision. They look around at alternatives and "evaluate" them based on what they learn about features and the successes achieved by others. They decide to look for the supplier who has sold the most and go with them. They may also go with the salesman that they feel most comfortable with.

All of these can present problems and increase costs for the business. If your company is losing money, or could save money by installing the software, any delay costs you money. The problem is that many myths exist about buying software.

Myth #1 Software that is successful in one business will be successful in another.

The success of a software product in one company is based on many factors. Some have to do with technical implementation issues. Much bigger issues:

• Is built to solve the problem that you have?
• Are your people ready for the change?
• Does your consultant really understand your business?

Myth #2 The best consultant to hire is the one that knows the software.

The statement says it all. The consultant knows the software, but does he understand YOUR business? Every business is unique. Yes, for the most part, business processes are the same. Yet I have found every one is also unique in certain ways. You may have certain things that you do that make you special. The software consultant may not understand the value.

Myth #3 Education provided by the software company is the best way to get trained.

The software company can train you on how to use their product. Unfortunately much if this training is often given through a "fire hose". Too much is given and not remembered. What is seldom understood, is that new software often brings a new business process. Your people need to understand how their jobs will be impacted. Not all of the functionality of the software is necessary for your business, especially at first. You would gain far more productivity by training on the business process changes, then on the functions in the software that will be utilized in the early stages.

Myth #4 Comparing features is the best way to evaluate software.

Every software product has many more features than any business requires. Many are not required by your business. Many may look neat but not be practical.

What's more important are the problems that you are now facing, what changes in the business process will be required and how the software will help to solve them.

Myth #5 Consultants cost too much. I can do it myself.

Consultants do cost money, but they can show you shortcuts and save you time and money.

The IT field is very broad and there are many specialties. No single person can understand it all, and even if they do a reasonable job of working through it, it will take more time, you will make more mistakes and not get as food a result. The reason people specialize is that they have the experience, have learned from their mistakes and can do a better job.

Myth #6 The cost of the software needs to be justified.

There are two problems with this myth.

The first is that there are many costs associated with installing software. The cost can be 4-5 times the price of the software. You also need to consider software supplier consulting costs, training, hardware, implementation and conversion and initial loss of productivity.

The second is that even if you justify the total costs, you will underestimate the value that the software can bring. The right software can make a significnt improvement in your business process, that far exceeds the cost of the software and associated costs. But you have to plan for it.

Software is an organizational change project

No business can survive without computerization today. Yet the success rate for software projects is highly variable. Some businesses are successful at gaining a return on investment. Many are not.

Why is the success rate variable? In many cases, the same software product is installed in similar businesses, why is one successful and another is not.

The reason is the same as the reason that organizational change projects have a high failure rate. When you change the software that runs your business, you are creating an organizational change and you have to manage it in a similar manner. It is not just a technology change and the reason for failure is not often technology or lack of technical skills.

What makes it an organizational change?

1) Your business operation is made up of business processes (quote, order entry, accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory, etc.).

2) What is business software? It is the automation of a business process (the process has been programmed to operate in a certain way). There are certain expectations in these processes, and many options available for tailoring the software to your business.

3) In order to implement the software successfully, you must understand your existing business processes in detail and choose the functionality of the software that best fits your needs. Many failures are due to the lack of understanding of this impact.

4) It is unlikely that there is a perfect match between what you are doing today and what the software allows you to do. At very least the software is automating functions that you were doing manually before. This means that people's jobs will be changing. Sometimes this requires organizational changes. If people don't understand the reasons for this change, they will resist it. The resistance will be directly proportional to the amount of flexibility that people have in their current jobs. Many software projects fail for this reason!

5) The software company is experienced in their software and provides training on its features and functions. However, it seldom relates exactly to how you do business. You receive fire hose training on the functions, but not on the changes in the business process. They search around for the features that will let them do what they used to do before. Sometimes they can no longer do what they did before in the way they used to do it. Although projects seldom fail for this reason, productivity goes down for a long time while people learn how to do the job using the new software.

When you make all of these changes, you change your business processes, you change people's jobs and sometimes you even end up changing the organization. If people don't understand why all of this is necessary, you will encounter problems.

Check in to see what the solution is.

Adding more elements to the people, process, technology diagram

In a new post on Value Delivery Management, Jed Simms has expanded the triangle of People, Process, Technology and added 4 new elements: Strategy, structure, information and culture as key elements for a software project to deliver business value.

While I have advocated most of these elements in my past posts, Jed has put it into one diagram.

To see his post, click here.

Does your software provide the information that you need to run your business?

I read a study a few months ago that identified two key issues about managers in a business:

• 15% or more of a manager's time is spent looking for information.
• 42% make decisions based on bad information, once per week.

Since the role of a manager is to make decisions, and decisions are made based on the information that is available, this means that managers are extremely unproductive (wasting 40% of their time) and ineffective if they make decisions on bad information.

What's the reason for this?

Most of our information today comes from computer systems. They are capable of producing data at a much higher rate than any manager can absorb. What is the problem?

Most software that is installed in a business is installed to handle normal transaction workload, because this is the obvious area. The more transactions that can be handled by the fewest staff creates a more productive environment.

However, hidden in all of these transactions is the data about your business. Unless you can extract this data, it isn't being used to manage your business.

In many assignments that I have taken on, I look for data about the business. By analysing that data, I can find out a lot about the business. It may take a lot of analysis and structuring before I can understand the value. In most cases, what I come up with is not known by the business owners and managers. They have assumptions about what is happenning that conflicts with the data. They don't know, because they don't get this information normally.

Computer systems are a great source of data, but it is useless unless the data can be turned into something useful that can be used to make decisions.

The 5 Ws of Software Project Success

Computers are a necessary component of every business today, yet the success rate for software projects in business is not very high. Most companies get some value from implementing software, yet they get far less than they should, and far less than if they looked at software as an investment rather than as a cost of doing business.

If you look at it as a cost, you look at whether you can afford it. If you look at it as an investment, you look at whether you will get a 20, 50 or 100% return. Very few businesses ever achieve returns that measure 20% let alone more than that.

We have all heard the questions that every reporter must answer in any article. They are: Why, what, where, who and when. It turns out that these questions are the same ones that generate results for software projects. The reason that software projects fail to achieve big returns is that there is not a clear answer to these questions.

Let's look at each of these in turn.

Why buy or install the software?
While this seems like a simple question, there are many potential answers to the question. This is often described as the goal or objective of the “project”. The software can be used to satisfy many different goals, and often the people involved interpret different goals from the original.
Take Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, for example. The assumed goal for some may be to increase sales, but CRM software can do many things:

• It has a contact manager.
• It has the capability to track every interaction with your customers.
• It has the ability to track the status of activity with a customer.

Saying that you want to implement CRM software encounters this type of conflict.

A recent client's objective was to understand the status of activity with customers. The reason was that he was having high turnover with salesmen, and when they left, he had no idea whether there was any sales in the works. By tracking the status, he could quickly assign someone to work on these customers to finish the sale. Most people that I talk to would not have assumed that this was his objective.

You must clearly define why you want to install the software to everybody involved.

What must happen to get the software to deliver the results needed?

Most software projects focus on software implementation, but this need has nothing to do with the software or training on the software. This has to do with how people do their jobs. If we use the example above, every salesperson needs to track all of their activity with clients if you are to be successful. This can be a lot of work.

What is the incentive for the salesperson? If there is no incentive, why would they do it? If they do it, how do you know whether the information that they capture is of value for your objective? Many projects attempt to capture all of the data, assuming that it will be of value later. This results in too much data that is of little value.

Define how you will track whether it is doing what you want it to do. Do it on a small scale to ensure that you can use the data that is being captured. Work with the data that provides the most value first.

Who, Where and When will the information be captured?
These are the questions that deliver the results. If people are in the office and working on their computers, it is easy to capture the information that you are looking for. Rather than write it down, people can type it. However, if they are in the field and don't have access to a computer, and don't have any other need to capture the information, it will be much more difficult. This is where most software projects go wrong. They try to capture too much information, but force people to do it on their own time and don't offer any benefit to the person doing it.

This is a case of less can be more. If you ask for too much, you will get garbage or not get it at all. If you ask for less, the most critical information, you are more likely to get it. If you also show the value that you get early, it is likely to be better information.

This completes the circle:

• Everybody knows why you are doing it.
• Everybody knows what must happen in order to meet the goal.
• The people who must do it, know where they have to do it and when.