Successful Deployment of Information Systems
A contract in place, stage payments recieved and the development program under way to deliver to a tight specification is still no guarantee of a successful deployment.
You generally need a strong advocate of the new system on the client side to actually achieve deployment since natural resistance to change amongst staff will otherwise work towards delaying deployment. That person will generally be the person who made the purchase decision, but they will be too senior to be directly involved with deployment, so they need a committed assistant who really wants the project to succeed.
Also don't forget the likely conflict between the client side IT guys' desire to build a system themselves, thus strengthening their position, and senior management's intelligent desire to avoid the in-house builder scenario.
That means you need to be able deploy quickly before your client side advocate, the person who was instrumental in getting the contract signed, moves on somewhere else or otherwise ut of the picture.
This is one reason why so much of our development work has focused on our having the tools available to configure and deploy really very quickly.
Also of course there is a real commercial advantage to being to give our client "what they want, when they want it" which is generally immediately after the final decision has been made.
29th August 2007
Ends.........
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