Part 2: The Toy Elephant

So, after the first fail is behind us, the management will denounce their expertise on such things and instead go find a BI Product. They heard about such miraculous products that give you what you need out of the box and looks nice, are integrated with their ERP and will again be the solution of all problems. The Business owner of the initiative contacts the vendor. They deliver a nice presentation with Eye Candy reports that top management loves to have on their big meeting room screens. They speak about an implementation fee and then a support subscription that will make sure everything works charming. The implementation works smooth, everything appears in order and people start using the system. After 2 weeks of fiddling around what has been done, new requirements start pooring in. How can I see the history of the product when it used to belong to a different category under that category? How do I get my sales achievement from when I replaced a colleague on vacation? How do I map some transaction based on some specific rules? Etc... No worries, we will call the vendor and get a quotation. The account manager keeps buying time and avoid giving a quotation or a timeline to get these done. After a while tension starts to build up and in the end they realise that this whole product they bought was just a shortcut to a fixed scope and when you want more, the customization is so expensive and hard to maintain that the vendor refuses to do it all together unless it's a common need and then it becomes part of the standard product. That means the solution is relatively cheap and gives useful results fast however anything beyond that basic need is impossible to be fulfilled. The people responsible with this project will try to sugarcoat it and will not admit it, but this will again be a failed project.

Lessons Learned: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't. There will be a price to pay further along the timeline.

How to avoid this: When you have a project, always include it in a big picture program that has all the foreseeable goals in scope. Don't get fooled by a shrewd salesman and Eye Candy and settle for covering a smaller limited scope. Make sure that the chosen solution has the potential to cover the whole program instead.

Stick around for more posts if you want to understand #WhyBI