On blueprints...
It struck me several years ago that some of the projects we embark upon with our clients will require a financial investment in the same order of magnitude of purchasing a home. Regardless of the size of the corporation, these decisions can have large downrange implications and must feel quite weighty to the decision-makers.
However, there’s one relatively large difference between a house purchase and the implementation of a corporate system. If you’re buying an existing home, you will look at several, maybe many if you’re my wife, walk through them (probably several times), and hire a third-party professional inspector to poke and prod at every system BEFORE writing a check. If you’re building a new house, you hire an architect to develop blueprints, you have a warranty from the builder, AND you still have a final walk-through before committing your life savings.
This same logic is behind Archetype's ‘Blueprint’ methodology.
We believe that the RFP process is broken:
- Vendors get to put their best foot forward in their own words, and the buyer needs to try to differentiate wheat from chaff
- There is very little discussion of what a solution needs to include to support various internal stakeholders
- Disparate project RFP's do not fit into the broader context of an organizational "blueprint"
Our clients deserve a much clearer picture of what they are getting when they commit to a relationship with a software company and a systems implementor.
Five years ago, we worked with a $2 billion Internet media business on a Financial Systems Blueprint. The purpose of the project was to lay out a 5-year roadmap for the platform, tools, and applications they would be using to measure and manage their business as they grew to $5 billion. The scope included analytics, financial close and consolidations, reporting, planning, pricing, profitability, master data management, information security, among other details.
With only a few additions and modifications that come from growth and evolution, they followed our blueprint quite closely, spending over $5 million on projects, some of which (not all) we implemented.
So, how much would you pay for blueprints on a $5 million house?
More importantly, would you ever commission a builder without blueprints?