Author: Glenn Payne Company: THREEDIGITAL
When selecting your client management system or CRM to run your home care or disability service, it’s important not to purchase a system in isolation of other software applications. Your CRM will be the heartbeat of the organisation, working harmoniously with other IT systems and applications. Understanding the importance of integration is key to successful digital transformation and saying goodbye to manual processes in your Finance, HR, payroll and BI systems. It’s easy to be sold a CRM that looks user-friendly and functionally good however, true value is gained when the rostering/scheduling system is talking to HR/Payroll systems, invoices and purchases are reconciling with the finance system and staff are looking at a single point of truth to make good decisions on client budgets, forecasting, leave management and workforce opportunities.
Sometimes organisations get sold a product through the pre-sales gloss, the widgets, the ‘nice to have functions’ in the sales demonstrations. Companies don’t spend adequate time looking under the hood to take a deeper look at the functionality, and to ask the right questions. Naturally, software vendors like to show you their latest award-winning features like AI-bots and Robotic Process Automation, to take your attention away from the fact that you want an open system that is able to talk to your other applications and be operationally sharp in a competitive environment. Writing down your core mandatory business requirements and ensuring that any demonstration is customer-led is key to not letting yourself be managed by these vendor-driven diversionary techniques.
Every week I talk to organisations that have buyer’s regret, its common! and avoidable. One of the biggest mistakes I see organisation’s make is not knowing what good looks like, they know their business and their process but might not know what best practise looks like across their industry. They build their old practices into a new system and customise it to the point of making it look and feel like their old platform. This is not only crazy, but expensive as well! You can see the vendors or system integrators rubbing their hands together dreaming of their Christmas bonus as they hear the word “customisation”. This leads to timelines and budget blowouts, but the biggest regret is that the new CRM, now unrecognisable, is no longer doing what it was intended to do.
Hiring in staff or consultants with industry knowledge who know what good looks like is key to ensuring a successful procurement and implementation of one of the most important projects you will run within your organisation. Too many times I have seen internal staff move in to manage a project to save money, or to give them a go! On occasions this can work; very rarely, and when it doesn’t, it can be catastrophic and even crippling.
Here are some of the ways in which organisations can reduce the risk of experiencing buyer’s regret:
Procurement
1. Having a solid business case or understanding what problem you are trying to solve, expected outcome and cost.
2. Having clearly defined business requirements. Mandatory, Essential, Desirable.
3. Going through a thorough procurement process, making vendors show mandatory requirements, reference checking, functional deep dives.
4. Buying a system where staff and functional areas have had input.
5. Buying a system that needs to be heavily customised but were told by presales that, “Yes it can do that”.
Implementation
1. Having internal project management, governance, tasks, risk and decisions management
2. Defining roles business owners, functional owners and change champions
3. Having the skills within the team to know what good looks like
4. Developing and executing change management and communication.
If you want to avoid buyer’s regret and are actively looking to implement your Home Care system, join us for our upcoming webinar on the 23rd of March 2023: https://homecare_apps_platforms_webinar.eventbrite.com.au