The Most Important Step – This step is probably the most important of all. ITX can provide you with what we believe would be typical criteria for a successful project and you can modify that. For each system success criterion, there must be a priority or a weight assigned.
Set Priorities – Everything can’t be priority one. Let’s just say you start with ten key success criteria. Try to resolve each of these ten items – IT, business, and corporate – to your satisfaction, and rank them with a priority of one to ten. We always suggest that IT be ranked last, but they seem to gravitate to first. However, products usually precipitate these PAS searches. So, the focus should be on the business side – where the most important issues are.
Limit the Scope – The document you can download from ITX will have a list of about 20 items – issues we think are most common in every project. You can then pick the top ten or add your own unique ones. You may even have subcategories, which could easily grow to 100 items, but it is important to identify and focus on only the top ten.
Keep the list of goals short, just the important items, because what tends to happen in these projects is, you may start a project in a straight line from A to Z, but end up going all over the place. That’s generally because of politics, philosophical views, or just the team. Some members of the team are stronger than others and they get their way. So, try to make this as objective as possible. Subjectiveness can lead to your project’s downfall.
Hold the Line – It is very important to nail down and solidify agreement on system success criteria and freeze it for the project’s duration. Because, as you get into the vendor world, and start looking at the various vendors, you don’t want to change your mind as to what’s now more important. You may see something that a vendor demonstrates, and no other vendor has, and you want that. Some team members have a tendency to do that – they all have their own agenda and they know what’s more important to them for POS or new business or claims, Etc.
It’s important to decide goals and priorities before you start looking at vendors. The systems success criteria should be exactly the same at the end of the project as it is in the beginning.