Turning Your Technology Projects into Lasting Solutions

By ImageSource Team on September 15, 2021

Technology projects tend to focus on a specific problem or narrow scope. There’s typically a failure or compliance issue that has some urgency. Due to time, budget, leadership support, and any other constraints, we put blinders on. Where do we find the time to consider future needs when evaluating possible solutions for our current needs? We don’t take an extra week or month to perform some minimum longer-term strategy. When deciding on a technology project solution, like a content migration or expansion, consider this question:

What other similar challenges do we face in other areas of our organization, and do we have a 1-3 year roadmap to solve them?

Without a roadmap in mind, it may prove challenging to make a vendor and technology selection that results in an investment for the long haul. Though all organizations are different, many of these challenges apply:

• Lack of technology selection plan or procedure
• Disconnection between business needs, procurement, and vendor onboarding
• Finding the time to build a new vendor partner relationship
• Change management procedures as part of an organizations DNA
• Training and supporting new technology
• Project funding

New technology selection

Even with your business requirements complete, identifying candidates, defining the processes, and making a technology solution selection is hugely time-consuming. Anyone who’s gone through the process while performing their day-to-day job knows it can be exhausting! Someone must coordinate all the stakeholders, create evaluation criteria, read reviews, demos and feature reviews, internal audit and compliance, evaluations and POC’s, and many other tasks that tend to pop up along the way. Consider who is responsible for the completion of these tasks and which stakeholders will make the final call. The individual likely feels personally accountable for the choice. The fear of failure can be paralyzing and eat up valuable project time. Gather managers and executives around the team to support the process and the final choice.

Procurement and vendor onboarding

After you select your new technology, procurement and onboarding begin, and you may have some concerns. How challenging is the end-to-end “approved vendor” and procurement process? The more important question: how long does the typical process take with all the required steps? This might include initiation, scoping, and approvals just to get started, generating RFP’s, vendor investigations/background checks, reference calls, NDA’s, SOW’s, MSA’s, etc. Be sure to work through these questions with your vendor partner. Define who will advocate for the vendor through the procurement and payment processes and encourage them to develop relationships with internal and external staff to streamline communications.

Building a new vendor partner relationship

There will be a learning curve with your new partner relationship about each other’s project teams and varying implementation processes and project management styles. A vendor needs to discover your unique business processes, understand your organizational environment, work with your IT group, etc., to form a partnership of mutual respect and gain a level of trust that they are acting in your best interests. What’s it like starting a project and developing a relationship with a new vendor? How are your teams working together? Are you on the same page?

Change management procedures

Change is hard. There’s always scope creep and some getting into reality over how the solution operates from a UX perspective vs. how the team imaged it would work or look. There will be change orders; maybe some additional costs are incurred for functions you thought were explicit but were implied after closer review. Good leadership won’t take that personally and will be transparent and timely in documenting changes and costs. It’s a good reminder not to be pennywise and pound foolish.

Training and supporting new technology

Convincing your user community of the value of a new solution and why they want to embrace it can be a battle. Getting IT, business analysts and other in-house staff fully trained and prepared to support the technology and expand it takes even more time. The related learning process and creating and providing meaningful training can feel like you are taking critical time away from an already busy schedule. Consider CBTs, training workshops, and open office hours for key project staff to help their colleagues get trained and utilize the solution. 

Project Funding

It can be easier to gain leadership and IT support to expand an existing, proven system you already have an infrastructure in place than to purchase a new one. It’s important to consider and document other costs, like person-hours, onsite equipment support, and even security risk or lost opportunity cost. It is also often helpful to have flexible spending options for growth rather than make another new capital expenditure. Options like SaaS or monthly billing and cloud deployments with a technology partner can change project funding. Additionally, when you’ve previously defined a strategic roadmap with leadership involvement, you’ve already set expectations of future funding needs and related ROI.

Minimizing Future Costs

Even though you must perform the required due diligence and change management steps, you can minimize how often you complete them by selecting:

• A vendor that will become a long-term partner in achieving your roadmap and maximizing your investment.
• A trusted advisor with a diverse resource pool and vast horizontal and vertical experience in that technology domain.
• A best-of-breed platform that is broad in functionality and organically developed as a seamless suite rather than pieced together through acquisition.

Look for technology with a roadmap to meet your long-term roadmap. Are you buying departmental band-aide or creating a healthy enterprise? What does your enterprise already have/need?

Accounts Payable: Will the new solution allow you to connect departments and steps with business process automation to meet the needs of other finance departments or lines of business?

Case Management: Will the new solution allow you to follow a transaction from end to end? Is there a model for external users as well as internal staff?

eForms: Will the new solution help you eliminate all those PDFs on your website? Can you reduce the customer/constituent steps required to initiate a transaction? Think about keeping a visitor on your website instead of downloading a document, filling it out, signing it, and submitting it in multiple visits.

Flexible Technology: Will the new solution be broad enough to support records retention policies, content cleanup, legacy system migration, platform consolidation, line of business integration, and significant digital transformation initiatives?

Utilizing a methodology to document and collaborate throughout your organization and with a partner can create visibility and consensus as you prioritize projects and select the right technology or solution for your needs. ImageSource has a trademarked methodology, the ECMECOSYSTEM™, which utilizes 26+ years of digital transformation and business process automation expertise.

Please see these additional resources below for more about how ImageSource and the ECMECOSYSTEM™ can guide you through these processes.

We are here to help and guide you with your migration journey and if you have any questions regarding content migration, feel free to send us a message and one of our team members will get back to you.