HOUSTON BUSINESS REVIEW

COST-EFFECTIVE IT: Putting It All Together
By Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show Commentator Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, provides weekly information on our show about information technology issues. Mr. Sonnier can be reached at 281.445.4800 x 250 or via email.

Last week, I explained how to getting the right hardware and software. This week I discuss putting together your money saving IT system.

Implementation

IT professionals call this step the implementation, but it is just putting together your system to fulfill your design. This is where IT projects seem to go bad since this is the step where reality confronts your design. Business owners often get extremely frustrated because it seems that "everything" is going wrong. It helps to understand what the IT staff is doing here.

How IT Engineers Implement

IT engineers put a system together by finding what does not work and then fixing those problems. Essentially, they will run test after test on the new system and create a long list of things that do not work. Next, they will fix the most important failures and retest. They will repeat this until the list of failures is acceptably short or the failures are minor items. IT projects go through the following phases:

1. Despair: Core functions do not work.

2. Frustration: Certain design assumptions are wrong and we need to redesign.

3. Disappointment: End users want changes. The system does not work the way they thought it would.

4. Distress: End users are making errors. The users do not work the way we thought they would.

5. Joy: Everything works pretty well and we need some additional features. We don't know how we ever did this without this system.

As you can see, things look bad until the last phase. IT projects follow this pattern due to the interaction of the technology and the people. IT is hard and definite. The system is going to do exactly what we program it to do. People are soft and flexible. The pain is lessened by doing a good job on the steps prior to this one, but there is always pain.

How to Survive Implementation

You can survive this step by:

1. Do the prior steps completely.

2. Be realistic on the schedule. Rushing it out to the users is certain to be extremely painful.

3. Let the engineers test and fix until you or a single primary user is happy.

4. Train the users on how to use the new system.

5. Add a few users at a time and give the engineers time to fix the system between each batch of new users.

6. Listen to the user's complaints, but separate current problems that must be fixed from the enhancements that can be done later.

7. Make small changes in the system. Let the users get use to the system. They can live with a few problems in the system and work around them; but, if you change the system every day, they will quit using it altogether!

Next week, I will continue this discussion by focusing on integrating the new system with the business process.