Software Success Challenges - Part 2 of the Software Success Series

Why Talk About Challenges Now?

In part 1 of this series, I explained what Software Success is and explained some fundamental concepts. In part 2, I outline many of the challenges to a successful cloud software deployment. I almost moved this article to the end of the series to allow time to introduce software success plans, best practices, important metrics, and so on. I decided to discuss challenges now, however, to demonstrate why good software success execution is so critical to an organization.

Software Success Has a Lot of Challenges

As I will show, there are a lot of mountains to climb to achieve a successful cloud software implentation. Indeed, the software choices and policies that today's organizations use strongly impact their productivity for better or worse. As I discussed in Part 1 of this series, almost everyone under-utilizes their software and, therefore, limits the productivity they achieve. The good news, on the other hand, is that by using best practices, productivity can often be increased dramatically. We will get to that topic in a future article, but for now, let's focus on the reasons we need help.

Problems, Problems, Problems

So what are all of these challenges we need to tackle? Many of them are best expressed via the metrics we would like to track. Things like:

Return on Investment: Probably the most important metric, but the one most difficult to measure. Are we getting our money's worth for the software we purchased? Are we getting the productivity and other benefits that we were promised? What about the time required and workflow efficiencies? Are they at the levels we expected?

I am not so much concerned with the return ON capital as I am with the return OF capital." Roy Rogers -- If you don't know who Roy Rogers is, you should, so look here:

Direction: Are the number of users growing, shrinking or staying the same? Why? Note that user growth is not always a positive indicator. Several negative underlying factors that have nothing to do with increased productivity may be responsible for this growth.

Team satisfaction: Do morale problems need to be addressed? Nils Vinje of Glide Consulting just published a very good article about how to deal with Customer Success team morale:

Tracking: Tracking is very important. Can you track all of the metrics you want to? Are there some metrics that you cannot track without buying more software? Is that worthwhile? Can you make do with the metrics that you can track? Will your vendor provide you with critical metrics for each user? They are, after all, hosting your software in the cloud, so they should have a lot of operational data at their fingertips. Do you have a software tool that allows you to easily log and track problems with the product? Can you tie it to your vendor's system to stay up to speed on fixes being implemented?

"People are more inclined to do what is INSPECTED rather than what is EXPECTED." Howard Dayton, Founder of Crown Ministries

Adoption: How many users are allocated with licenses? Are all of the licenses purchased assigned? This is adoption.

Utilization: Have users been trained on how the software will make them more productive at their specific use case? Will the vendor help? Are users using the product regularly? Do you have a way to monitor this? This is utilization and is typically measured as the number of users using the software in a month expressed as a percentage of the total number of licensed users. I have found that utilization levels of 60% and above signals a healthy deployment. Utilization under 20% is troublesome and signals turbulence ahead. Many organizations see this as a leading indicator that the software is about to be dumped and the contract cancelled. That's not good for anyone, which is a primary reason to take every opportunity to show users how to be more productive with their software.

Ease of Use, Learning Curve, Productivity: How easy is the software to use? Is it so easy that there is little value? Is the software very early in its lifecycle, meaning that it is pretty buggy and clunky to navigate? Try to avoid that if you can. Is the trade-off correct between ease of use and the ability to perform necessary, but sophisticated tasks? Does it take more than 3 months to become proficient and productive?

Hope on the Horizon

Despite all of that negativity, there are several reasons for hope. First, cloud software from the right vendor is continually improving, yielding ever-improving performance. If there are flaws, therefore, often they will be fixed almost automatically over time. Second, and more importantly, users are also continuing to grow and adopt the habits necessary to succeed in the cloud software world. Recognizing them publicly for their efforts above and beyond to better incorporate productivity improvement practices will encourage others to do the same, thereby upgrading the corporate culture.

A Journey, Not a Destination

Many things in life require the proper attitude and Software Success is no different. Good software success is achieved by setting up a good plan at the beginning, incorporating best practices and continuing to refine them over and over. Progress is the goal, not perfection. More on that in a future article!

Feedback

Any thoughts? Add them to the comments or send them along to me!

Matt Allen

919-349-2113

[email protected]