The phone rings.
Shortly after, the salesperson tries to convince you that their solution will take your business to a higher level.
Your employees knock at the door because they would like to buy a new fancy program.
Maybe you think,” There must be a digital solution for this”, when planning gets critical, and you face problems that don't solve themselves.
The market has digital solutions that can help you evolve your business.
But many digital solutions never succeed for the companies buying them.
There are many reasons for this.
Maybe the solution does not match the employees’ work processes. Maybe there was no support in the organisation. Or there was no apparent purpose for investing in the software.
In other words, It was a bad digital business case.
At the end of this article, you can download a helpful checklist that helps you when looking for business software.
To not put your investment at risk, it is a good idea to distance yourself from the good relationship with the salesperson and your gut feeling.
You need something which resembles objectivity and a reasonable basis.
To form a reasonable basis, it is important to use a structured approach.
You do not need to make it harder than it is.
But at the same time, it is essential to consider the decisive factors. They determine if your investment is a success or a failure.
This guide helps you create and invest in new software.
You can use the guide if you are in doubt if you should invest in a specific piece of software.
You can also use it to incorporate a structured approach to digitising your business. Something a lot of people struggle to do.
When you go through the guide, creating a strategy for your future digitisation will be easier. It focuses on some questions that map your organisation’s basic work processes and identify the needs.
The guide also works as a help for you who have found a piece of software which you find will be a good investment but still need to convince the board, your management team or your colleagues about it.
Here, it helps you build a good and well-informed case.
To help you assess if a piece of software is the right one for your company, we have gathered 5 useful questions.
Each question clarifies the vital considerations you must include in your decision-making process.
Including more employees or colleagues when answering the questions is a good idea. They will often be able to provide you with the different perspectives you need.
It may sound trivial. But the first part of your considerations should be to find out which problem the software should solve.
The alarms should go off if your employee stops by your office with a super-smart program that does not solve one or more of your specific problems.
When buying new software, the problem should call for a solution, not vice versa.
Because we are attracted to shiny things, and because we at the same time tend to rationalise our decisions once they are made, companies are often stuck with software they should not have bought in the first place.
And they are stuck with the software for too long.
When the software doesn't solve a problem but only "shines", the employee will experience it as a burden as it doesn't solve their problems.
In other words, You don't get value from your new software.
In the heat of a sales meeting, it may be difficult to make head or tail of the financials.
And many turn insecure when they need to add specific value to a piece of software.
But you do yourself a great disservice if you have not calculated the costs and ROI of your investment. Nobody wants a software solution that smashes the financials.
Unfortunately, this is often the case.
It makes good sense to include three central figures in the financial part of your considerations:
Let us set one thing straight: Software does not solve any problems on its own.
If you find it difficult to invoice your customers because the consultants don't hand in the hours, or because invoices disappear in mountains of internal e-mails, a new piece of software will not solve your problems.
A part of the problem may be that you lack intelligent software allowing the employees to communicate with each other and execute invoices quickly.
But a different part of the problem may be that you do not have the right process for working with invoices internally.
You need tp take a look at:
If you do not want to change the process for the software to work properly, it is probably not a good investment to buy it.
Have you ever bought software which your employees did not use?
Then, you are not alone.
Often, software is bought based on the best intentions, but the decision-makers have not consulted their employees.
The result may be employees who believe the software is an obstacle in their daily work and why they do not use it.
If you purchase software in the same way, there is a high risk that:
In other words, there is a high risk that you lose money if you skip this step.
Or even worse, Your employees are forced to work in a way which makes them less efficient.
An IT system seldom stands alone.
Most small and medium-sized companies use a mix of digital tools for project management, internal communication, invoicing, salary payment, and so on.
Often they are not integrated, and sometimes they support some of the same work processes. This presents a risk of double work.
TimeLog delivers Professional Services Automation (PSA software) supporting processes from time tracking, invoicing, project management, resource management to salary management, etc..
This means potential buyers need to find out if they have a different piece of software already facilitating the processes and if there is a risk of double work if you have several digital tools to support the same work processes.
Potential buyers need to find out if the systems can integrate to share data across the systems. It is not smart if the time tracking cannot transfer data to the salary and financial systems.
It, therefore, makes good sense to find out how your IT ecosystem looks.
This guide provides overall guidelines for buying all sorts of business software - making the approach very generalistic.
If you need to supplement this guide with a specific guide for finding the proper project management or time tracking system, you should download our checklist using the link below.
The checklist will help specify your organisation's needs if you're looking for time tracking or project management software.
Click the link below to download the checklist.