| |
How Not to Screw Up Your
Software Investment
July 16, 2008
Among the companies I've worked with one of the
biggest money holes is poor software training. So many companies, from
Fortune 100 down to 10-20 employee businesses believe that the training
provided by the software manufacturer is sufficient. It never is because
while the software company may understand the generalities of your industry,
they never have a full understanding of the your company's particular way of
doing business. That's a fact.
You can spend millions on the latest and greatest enterprise software to run
your business. However, if the people who use that software daily don't
fully understand how to get the most out of it, you've wasted your
investment. The new software will end up adding little or no productivity to
your workforce, and may end up making things worse. Your people will get
frustrated and develop a bad attitude about the "system." This is especially
true among less tech savvy employees.
How often have you heard a customer or supplier of yours complain over the
phone that their "system" is slow, or it is hard to find information? If
your experience is like mine, you hear it a lot. What message does that send
about their company? Either their software is lousy, or their people are too
dumb to use it. Sometimes, both are true, but more often the people just
haven't been properly trained.
A great example of this is a small company I worked for that upgraded their
enterprise software after 20 years of working with an outdated, slow, and
just plain difficult to use custom software. The company upgraded to a
canned software system designed for companies in their industry. It was a
great package with lots of excellent features that were certainly going to
be very beneficial to all the employees.
Because of poor training however, employees hated the new software. They
longed for the old system because as difficult as it was, it was familiar.
That's the key. They knew how the old system worked, and how it related to
their daily tasks.
At first all was well. A team of employees was given the task of
transferring data, and preparing the new software for the go live date. Each
employee was given a series of CD ROM's that taught them all about the
software, and quizzed them on the features. Six weeks prior to the go live
date four-hour training sessions were scheduled for three nights in a row
with all the employees and a trainer from the software company. Everyone
learned a lot about the new software.
What the software trainer could not teach was how to apply the particular
situations each employee faced on a daily basis to the software. The trainer
knew the software inside and out, but had no idea about company procedures,
methods, etc., and how they relate to the software. So, for all the training
the employees got on the technical aspects of the new software, they really
didn't know how to use it effectively.
So, along came the go live day, and all H-E double hockey sticks broke
loose. The team originally charged with transferring data, and preparing for
go live was overwhelmed with questions, complaints, and whining about the
software. When it came time to use the software for real most employees were
lost. This put a significant burden on management to deal with all the
questions and complaints, and slowed productivity to a crawl.
Worse, the attitude of the employees began to sour toward the new software.
Once a bad attitude sets in it is extremely difficult to turn around. Some
employees began vocalizing their frustration while talking with customers.
That's bad news because now they were telling their customers their company
was screwed up. That does not exactly instill confidence among customers.
Besides, bad word spreads like a virus.
The company's huge investment was essentially wasted because there were no
improvements from the new software.
As time went on certain employees began to figure things out. They began to
understand how to make the new software work with their needs, and how
canned software can flex to fit a particular company. The problem was some
people figured out some things, but not others. No one had solved all the
problems. Even worse there was no forum to discuss these little nuggets of
knowledge. So, no one was sharing their discoveries with others in the
company. The result was some employees gaining productivity in some areas
while others were gaining productivity in other areas, but the organization
as a whole was not seeing any measurable gains.
Had management created a way for employees to share their ideas,
discoveries, shortcuts, etc. the entire organization could adopt these
techniques. A weekly meeting coupled with a message board or posting forum
on their intranet would have sparked discussion among employees. Management
could then take the best ideas, and implement them as written guidelines for
all employees.
Instead their shiny new software system became a mess of disconnected and
missing data entered with no consistent format. The company might as well
have burned the money spent on the software and related hardware to support
it.
The lesson is understanding that technical training is only half the battle.
To fully utilize an enterprise software system, and squeeze all the
productivity possible from it, you must exert significant effort over time
to develop a best practices forum for your employees. You must encourage
your employees to contribute to the forum, even if anonymously. You must
then consistently cultivate the best ideas of your employees, and
incorporate them into corporate guidelines for daily use.
Or, you could just throw money away. Your choice. |
Back to Article Index
Reprint Rights |
