Software selection methods

With Olive, you can anonymously look at all the solutions available in the space, within the context of how these solutions meet your evolving business needs. Olive takes this long list of vendors and boils it down to a shortlist that is assured to meet your needs. Searching for reviews on Capterra or G2Crowd can deliver biased and irrelevant results. Olive does not charge vendors, and we keep your identity from the vendors until you decide to bring them to demo , so you can be confident that there is no bias on the shortlist.

With Olive, you can check out various project requirements ahead of time in our rich requirements libraries, easily gather stakeholder feedback through surveys and easily filter out vendors based on your requirements. Contact us for a demo, or to learn more about how Olive works. Top 5 buying factors for Enterprise Software. Olive is an end-to-end digital transformation platform for streamlining IT purchase decisions. Whether you're a CIO looking for a new solution or evaluating your existing tech-stack or a Consultant looking to manage multiple evaluations, our platform reduces time spent, risk, and overall cost to decision.

We're something for everyone! No matter your role, we have you covered. Posted on. Users don't adopt it, the vendors have over-promised and under-delivered, or a crucial stakeholder was missed during the software selection process. The Traditional Software Selection Process Gone are the days when you had to have systems built for specific problems.

Determine a business case for the solution required A business case ensures your company realizes measurable business benefits from the solution required. Lead with your business needs Understanding your business needs is a crucial step in the process of buying software. Key Considerations; What are your business goals for the next year? What areas of the business are growing, and what areas are shrinking? How could the right solution benefit our company?

Do we have the right budget for our needs? What does success mean to our business? Define and rank your requirements list for the software When you and your team are clear and aligned on what your business needs are, the next step is to rank and define your must-have requirements list, the non-negotiables that the software solution must have, including but not limited to; Cost Functional requirements Security Integrations with current enterprise software infrastructure When you have defined your must-haves, you can then take a look at your nice-to-have requirements.

This may include; User Experience White labeling and branding Mobile platform This should be a collaborative effort amongst the team. What sort of accessibility do you need the solution to have? Does the vendor provide an implementation plan and support? What are the shortcomings of the current solution?

What technical features do we need the solution to have? What workflows must the new software incorporate? What problems should the new solution solve? Determine the long list of vendors This stage of the process should be to list as many vendors as possible within your bandwidth that meet the general requirements of what you are looking for—research online for solutions in the space.

Get to the short list of best-fit vendors Now that you have your ranked requirements list, have outlined cost considerations, and researched as many vendors as you logistically can in the space - you can get to a short-list of best-fit vendors or products that will work for you using your specific business needs as the filter.

Select the right vendor Based on the product demos, you will likely have a favorite. Use Olive to find your best-match software vendor, faster than ever before Sometimes, you just don't have the internal ability, funds, or time to manage the evaluation process.

Tagged: Evaluations. Featured Posts. Tags AI. Agile Digital Transformation. BI Solutions. Business Analyst. You can use CSFs as a way to determine whether a requirement is really critical.

Before starting any project, you should know how to measure success in terms of saving money by streamlining operations, increasing revenues, increasing market share… Measurements of success act as a motivator for staff during the implementation, help keep the project on track and focus effort on attaining important business objectives.

Until you have understood the existing business process, you are not ready. Employees may not know that what they are doing is atypical. Roll up your sleeves and talk to the people who do the work. Remember the devil is in the details.

Along the way, your value add may be in identifying ways to improve business process. Every problem is an opportunity in the new system. The more ambiguous the requirement, the more interpretation in whether a particular vendor meets the requirement. You need to be precise so that you can compare apples to apples.

Systems have matured to the point where the basics are done well. Focus only on the requirements that are unique or could vary by vendor. Not all requirements are created equally. Project management is the key factor in predicting success of any project.

Project management includes management of scope, budget and timing. Rather than using the school of hard knocks, you should consider working with a structured methodology such as published by the Project Management Institute PMI.

Recognize the significant amount of employee knowledge and the potential contribution of the employees. Unfortunately, the knowledge is typically in the heads of the employees and care must be taken to include their input. At the same time, you are effectively including them in the process and securing their buy-in for the process. An internal champion should be allocated to the project. Even the most difficult projects can become successful when you have an internal champion who is ready to do whatever it takes to get the job done.

It is best to assign the internal champion at the beginning of the system selection project to ensure their commitment and agreement with the system selected. Seek out potential risks, their impact, and their likelihood of occurring.

Encourage all interested parties to develop strategies to mitigate the risks. Every organization has at least 1 naysayer, who can cause a lot of problems, but who is also very knowledgeable. The naysayers must be included in the risk management process. By getting their input early, you can avoid problems and you effectively limit their negativity. Create collaborative software selection environment for your team. Make sure your team is working from the same information from the start of the software selection process.

Ensure your team has a shortlisting environment where they can work together. Do your due diligence on software vendors by reviewing how their employees see the company by checking out sources such as Glassdoor during the shortlisting process.

Ask vendors to provide customer reviews of companies similar to yours. Make sure to ask potential software vendors for information from current customers in similar industries to your own whether that is case studies, reviews or contact details of companies willing to talk about their experiences directly.

Now, you need to assess the potential software by those requirements, starting with your must-have functional requirements. This list should also be prioritized based on the value each feature would add to the business. A software that can tick off as many of your nice-to-haves as possible is likely going to be prioritized over a software that meets only functional requirements.

The next step down from nice-to-haves is the extra features. Extra features that may fit into this category would be features such as on-demand reporting of specific metrics, or customizable summary dashboards at user level.

When factoring efficacy into your software selection, you should ask yourself a series of questions:. The example above would indicate that Software B meets more functional feature requirements than any other software, despite the fact that Software A and C have more features, meaning it is the clear winner.

Does this software meet the needs of your users? If your requirements gathering process was a success, and consulted stakeholders across all departments, resulting in a well-prioritized list of requirements, the answer should be yes. The next level to this is the usability; is the system easy to use? If you promised to make their lives easier with streamlined processes, deliver on the promise with a simple to use system.

This also ties in with our earlier discussion on culture. How likely is it that the shortlisted systems will achieve these goals? And, assuming they do, how long will it take them to fully realize the goals? However, if the systems time frames vary by months, or even years, it may be a deciding factor during your efficacy evaluation. Divide your requirements into functional, nice-to-have, and extra features. During the selection process you should divide your requirements list into three sections to determine which features are the most important to your overall business goals and objectives.

Filter software based on your requirements. Filter your software comparison and shortlist by software that meets your basic functional requirements so you only have software that will meet your needs. Determine which software meets the most functional requirements. You should assess your shortlist by how many functional, nice-to-have, and extra features each system has, then remove any software that does not meet the functional requirements you need.

Shortlist the software that meets the highest number of feature requirements across the categories. This will allow you to determine which software will meet the most of your needs and objectives as well as provide additional functionality that would benefit your business.

Now you just have to ask yourself one question: Does it ACE the software selection test? The ACE software selection process: Affordability: is your software value for money and within budget?

And, how will your employees react to the software? Efficacy: does the software meet your requirements? Will it help you achieve your business goals? Affordability The first question on most businesses minds is: how much will the software cost? How much does the system cost per year? What features do you get for the price? This will provide a fuller image of what is being provided for the total cost.

What does the software cost include? Pricing models There are also different pricing models that you should take into account, your business may prefer one setup over another. Perpetual licensing This hosting method means your business hosts the software on their own server on-premise. Software as a Service SaaS model The SaaS model, most often seen in cloud hosting, is steadily growing more popular with businesses of all sizes. Which one is the right pricing model?

Shortlisting software on affordability The affordability of your software should be based on multiple factors beyond the licensing cost. Make like-for-like comparisons between systems comparing cost over the same period of time Compare pricing information across multiple systems over the same time period.

Check the number of features each system offers depending on pricing model You should identify the features each software provides, and if the feature lists expand when selecting higher tier pricing models. Our report data found that the reasons for implementing a new business software varied from: Implementing to increasing efficiency Supporting growth with a new system Received poor support from existing vendors Replacing an outdated legacy system Integrating global operations The backgrounds of those using the system the most should be taken into consideration during the choosing of the system.

Will the software deliver on the business goals they are looking for? Team collaboration Selecting a software should be a collaborative effort across the entire business.