Home/I want it done right the first time
Door threeI want it done right the first time.
You are about to change something that matters: new software, a second location, the first hire who is not you. This is the work where planning costs a little and skipping it costs a lot.
The decision is bigger than the demo.
Software gets chosen from a demonstration, in a good mood, against a list of features rather than a description of the work. Then the business bends itself around the tool.
The costly part is never the licence. It is the six months of half-use afterwards, the two people who kept the old spreadsheet, and the process nobody wrote down.
Sound familiar
- You are shortlisting software and unsure how to compare
- Two departments describe the same job differently
- The last rollout never quite finished
- Everything important lives in one person’s head
- You are opening a location and copying nothing but hope
- Somebody said the word “AI” and now there is a deadline
What happens when the decision is made too early.
of recently implemented ERP projects will fail to fully meet their original business case, and a quarter of those will fail catastrophically.
of ERP strategies are not strongly aligned to the business strategy behind them, which is where the confusion starts.
Five deliverables, in order.
Every one of these is a document you keep, in plain language, written so a new employee could use it.
A map of the work as it is
We interview the people doing it and draw the real flow, including the workarounds. This is usually the first time anyone has seen the whole thing on one page.
Written requirements
What the system must do, in the language of the business. Badly managed requirements are the single biggest reason projects miss their goals, and the cost of a mistake grows by an order of magnitude the later it is found.
A shortlist and a decision
Two or three options scored against your requirements, with the trade-offs written down. Buyers almost always purchase from the shortlist they started with, so the shortlist is the decision.
The build and the migration
Configuration, data cleaned before it moves, integrations to the systems that need to talk, and a cutover plan with a way back.
Documentation and training
Procedures written down, short sessions by role, and a review a few weeks later once the real questions have surfaced.
The part everyone underfunds.
Technology projects are judged on the software and lost on the people. This is the best-evidenced finding in the field and the first line cut from most budgets.
of projects with excellent change management met or beat their objectives. With poor change management, 13%.
of digital transformations fall short, and the people side is usually the deciding factor rather than the technology.
of employees are willing to support enterprise change, down from 74% in 2016, while absorbing ten changes a year instead of two.
A system nobody was taught is a system you pay for twice.
We include role-based training and written procedures in every engagement of this kind, and a follow-up session weeks later, because a single session at go-live does not survive contact with a busy month.
Learning fades fast without reinforcement. That is not a motivation problem, it is how memory works, and the fix is cheap: short sessions, written steps, and somewhere to look things up.
of software users say they lack the training they need for the applications their job requires.
received an hour of training or less for software they use every day, and 51% got no role-based onboarding at all.
of what was learned survives a month without reinforcement, in a controlled replication of the forgetting curve.
of what a business knows exists only inside one person’s head. When they are away, that share of the job cannot be done.
hours a week are lost waiting on information from colleagues or rebuilding knowledge that already existed.
months is how long a new hire can take to reach full speed, after two and a half months of formal training.
Your business should not depend on who is in the building.
When a large share of what a company knows lives in one head, every holiday is a risk and every resignation is an outage.
Documentation is the least exciting deliverable we produce and the one clients thank us for two years later. It is also what makes a business sellable.
We will tell you if you are not ready.
Almost every small business asks. The honest answer is usually that the data is not in a state where it would help yet, and the first useful step is boring: clean records, one source of truth, documented process.
Get those and several genuinely useful things become easy: answering enquiries, drafting quotes, summarising jobs. Skip them and you join the majority of pilots that never reach production.
of organisations do not have, or are not sure they have, the data practices AI requires.
of AI proofs of concept never reach wide deployment, four out of every thirty-three.
By the scope, agreed before we start.
This work does not fit a tier, so we do not pretend it does. After a discovery call we scope it and give you a fixed price with the deliverables named. Typical engagements:
| Process map and requirements | Two to four weeks. A documented current-state map and a written requirements set you own and can take to any vendor. |
|---|---|
| Software selection | Adds two to three weeks. Shortlist, scoring against your requirements, reference checks and a written recommendation. |
| Implementation and migration | Scoped after selection. Configuration, data cleaning, integrations, cutover plan and a way back. |
| Documentation and training | Included in the above, or standalone for a system you already run. Written procedures plus role-based sessions and a follow-up. |
| Ongoing operations | Once it is running, most clients move it onto a monthly agreement so somebody keeps it current. |
Before you book.
We already picked the software. Too late?
Not at all, and it is a common starting point. We work with what you bought: mapping the process, configuring properly, cleaning the data before it moves and training people on it. Skipping the selection step makes the engagement shorter and cheaper.
Can we do just the requirements and stop?
Yes, and some clients should. The requirements document is yours; you can take it to any vendor or implementer. We would rather you own a good document than sign a bigger project you are not ready for.
How much of our time will this take?
Interviews are thirty to sixty minutes each, usually five to ten people. After that most of the work is ours. The exception is training, which needs your people in a room. That is unavoidable and it is the part that determines whether any of it lasts.
What if the answer is that we do not need new software?
Then we say so. It happens often. Frequently the tools are adequate and the real problem is that nobody agreed how to use them.
Let’s find out what should change first.
A discovery call is thirty minutes. We ask about the business, not the software. You leave knowing what we would do first and what it would cost, whether or not you hire us.
What happens on the call
You talk, we listen
Ten minutes on what is actually going wrong and what you have already tried.
We name the first move
One recommendation, in order of priority, with the reason behind it.
You get a number
A real price range before you leave the call. No proposal cycle, no chasing.
No sales script. No obligation. If we are not the right fit we will say so and point you somewhere better.