Comprehensive requirements gathering, a thorough analysis and thorough evaluation is essential for reducing software selection risks and buying the product best matched to your specific requirements. Many companies run the IT departments at close to 100% capacity with little to spare. Thoroughly evaluating software from different vendors can be extra work in an already full schedule. With that in mind, Wayferry offers Software Selection Consulting Services, which include:
Requirements Gathering & Analysis
- Interview stakeholders to identify initial requirements.
- Capture any potential products the stakeholders want considered.
- Reverse engineer potential products to flesh out requirements. (This is a very efficient way to capture requirements. See: How to find unknown purchase requirements.)
- Use Wayferry to document the requirements, how important they are, and why they are important and optionally, who they are important to.
- Identify requirements that if not adequately met, will cause a product to be excluded. (Show stoppers)
Product Evaluation & Rating
- Develop list of potential products to be evaluated. Perform web research if necessary.
- Evaluate the products based on product data available on the web.
- Use the evaluated products to find any missing requirements.
- Produce initial ranked list of product candidates.
Evaluation Deliverables
- Identify requirements that must be evaluated in depth for the leading product candidates.
- If required, evaluate the leading product candidates in depth. For large projects like selecting an ERP system, this is often done by the vendor in the form of an RFI response.
- Produce a ranked list of product candidates, with a score for each product that measures how well each product meets the requirements.
Product Selection
- Based on the information provided, you make the final product selection.
The final evaluation can be exported as a spreadsheet for archiving. Work can be on site or remote. We can also provide IT project management. pilot and implementation services.
Please note that Wayferry does not sell any software products, nor have a vested interest in any of them. Our mission is to provide you with the tools and skills to make better software selection.
Customer Acceptance Testing
Large projects like ERP implementations are high-risk, and the technical press is peppered with examples of failures. To reduce those risks, Wayferry offers customer acceptance testing where we test the implemented system against your original requirements.
Customer acceptance testing can be written into the software implementation contract with appropriate penalties so the risk is shared between the customer, the software vendor and the implementation consultants. This does mean spending more up front on the requirements, but the results make it well worthwhile.
Next Steps
For more information or to initiate a consulting engagement please email us at: consulting@wayferry.com