How to Buy the
Right Software

Chapter 1: Business Needs Drive Everything

Why are you shopping for software? This isn’t a glib question and it will be harder to answer than you expect. Let’s consider common reasons companies look for new software solutions.

Reasons for New Software

• Current software: not supported, problematic, expensive, untrustworthy, and/or hated by users
• No software: paper processes, so lots of chaos, pain, and resource sink

Possible Problem Areas That Cost $$

With this in mind, it’s good to consider what the impact of the current situation is—what are the relevant challenges or problems affecting your business?

• Team costs: inefficiencies, inaccuracies, miscommunications, fumbles, lack of trust, onboarding new team
• Failure and recovery costs: poor quality, business delivery problems, service and support issues
• Opportunity-lost costs: what you could have done with better/faster/more accurate processes
• Brand/customer relationship costs: negative impact to your brand or customer issues that cost contracts or future business

So, why are you shopping for software in the first place? We ask because we’ve seen companies fail at software selection. Failing to get the right solution to solve business challenges often stems from undefined business requirements. Your evaluation process should be based on a solid understanding of your critical and nice-to-have business needs. These business needs should be the guiding compass you use for everything else from requirements definition to vendor research to purchase. Business needs will drive everything starting now through implementation and future upgrades.

Identifying the Business Needs

You might already know your business needs, but if you don’t, this short exercise will help. If you personally know the business need(s), consider doing this exercise with your team, the other stakeholders, and your executive sponsor. Doing this will promote buy-in to the entire process from selection to implementation to go-live.

Consider and answer these fundamental questions:

1. Why did you start looking for software?

   Current software challenges (and which software) ________________________________

   No software

2. What are the business processes that need improvement?
3. Who participates in these processes? Think beyond your team to others impacted as you follow the process from start to finish.
4. Who owns these processes? Which teams have revenue or cost responsibilities?
5. What are these problems costing the business right now in these areas? You’ll look more closely at ROI later, but this calculator will help you assess costs of mistakes for product and quality management work based on your inputs.

   Team costs

   Failure and recovery costs

   Opportunity-lost costs

   Brand/customer relationship costs

   Compliance costs

This exercise will allow you to clearly state the business objectives. You want to take this information and get to a business needs statement in the form of:

We must improve W and have better X to accomplish Y and meet Z.

Circulate this “Business Needs” statement until you have input and agreement from all stakeholders.

Gaining Executive Sponsorship

Once you have a business needs statement, your company should prioritize solving these needs. Get executive-level agreement that the business needs statement you are crafting is a priority. We have seen committees select the perfect software, but the buying process was derailed for another project. And, some committees get the money but lack the executive support needed across the teams to make the implementation successful. A clear, executive-backed business reason for the project will help overcome naturally negative feelings about change during implementation and go-live.

Go back to your exercise above and look at the process owners you’ve identified. You may need executive sponsorship from one or more teams that have process ownership and/or revenue responsibility. Most successful software implementations have sponsorship across ALL identified teams that take part in these key processes.

Set your efforts up for success early by socializing the business needs to any executives that are not already involved. While you may not yet get full buy-in, you can set context and update your business needs statement after the stakeholders have supplied input. You may need to quantify the costs identified in the business exercise. Coming up with actual dollar values will require some investigation and calculations. If your business needs are product and quality management related, you can use this tool to help.

Agreement to Shop for Software

Clear business needs drive successful software selection. Your business needs statement should articulate the current costs of not fixing the problem to gain executive sponsorship. Do this and you can not only begin looking for software that will help—but actually buy and implement the software you’ve selected.