You built a fantastic piece of technology that will double revenues – NOW WHAT?
Today I write about deploying finished products to the field. This is critical to the success of any project, is very difficult to do correctly, but most IT managers naïvely think is straightforward to accomplish. Allow me to build up my case with a little background.
Business people realize that IT infrastructure, applicable to the business and properly implemented, has a tremendous impact to the bottom line profitability of a company. Technology enables additional revenue streams and realizes cost savings. The promise of IT is fantastic! However, IT can be costly in and of itself, so if it fails, then it is simply money wasted.
Software development has been around for quite some time now. We have learned a tremendous amount from all the mistakes that have been made. Through the years we have evolved methodologies, consultancies, and tools to the point where, today, most any organization, given executive sponsorship, can create relevant technology to deliver on the promise of increased profitability for their individual businesses. Given any IT project to create tools for the business, if we set out on a path to build the software using generally accepted best practices of project management, then we greatly increase our chances for success.
Many tools exist on the market today that internalize these best practices to help us “build” something new. Generally these fall into the project management category. Mostly they have a resemblance to Microsoft Project and for good reason. Microsoft Project, despite many shortcomings, enables traditional projects (where something is being “built”) to be organized in a logical way so they can be tracked to completion.
So consider we successfully completed and have in our hot little hands a project created by the IT staff or a consultancy. Now it’s time to roll out this wonderful technology to the field. Uh-oh.
Our next installment covers what to do!
Written by John Livermore - Multi-site Project Management
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