What are the best practices for ensuring your customizations meet industry standards?

1 Define your requirements

Before you start customizing your enterprise software, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve and why. What are the business problems or opportunities you are trying to address? What are the functional and non-functional requirements of your customizations? How will you measure the success and impact of your changes? By defining your requirements upfront, you can avoid unnecessary or excessive customizations that may create more problems than they solve.

2 Follow the best practices of software development

Customizing enterprise software is not just a matter of tweaking some settings or adding some features. It is a software development project that requires following the best practices of software engineering, such as coding standards, version control, code reviews, testing, debugging, and deployment. By following these practices, you can ensure your customizations are consistent, reliable, secure, and maintainable. You can also leverage the tools and frameworks provided by the enterprise software vendor or the open source community to simplify and streamline your development process.

3 Align your customizations with industry standards

One of the benefits of using enterprise software is that it often follows industry standards and best practices for data, processes, and interfaces. These standards help ensure interoperability, compatibility, and compliance across different systems and platforms. When you customize your enterprise software, you should try to align your customizations with these standards as much as possible, or at least avoid violating them. For example, if you are customizing a CRM system, you should follow the standards for data models, data quality, data security, and data integration.

4 Minimize your customizations

Customizing enterprise software can be tempting, but it can also be costly and risky. Every customization you make adds complexity, dependency, and overhead to your system. It also increases the likelihood of errors, conflicts, and bugs. Moreover, it may affect the upgradeability, scalability, and supportability of your system. Therefore, you should minimize your customizations as much as possible, and only customize what is absolutely necessary and beneficial. You should also consider using alternative solutions, such as configuration, integration, or extension, instead of customization, whenever possible.

5 Test your customizations thoroughly

Testing is a crucial step in ensuring your customizations meet industry standards and work as expected. You should test your customizations at different levels, such as unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and user acceptance testing. You should also test your customizations under different scenarios, such as normal operations, peak load, failure recovery, and security attacks. By testing your customizations thoroughly, you can identify and fix any issues or defects before they affect your users or your business.

6 Document your customizations properly

Documentation is another essential step in ensuring your customizations meet industry standards and are easy to understand and maintain. You should document your customizations at different stages, such as design, development, testing, and deployment. You should also document your customizations at different levels, such as code, configuration, interface, and user. By documenting your customizations properly, you can communicate your rationale, requirements, specifications, and results to your stakeholders, developers, testers, and users.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?