5 Steps to Success When Implementing New Technology

5 Steps to Success When Implementing New Technology:

Implementing new technology, whether it’s an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or another critical technology solution for your business, requires diligence, budget, time, and lots of planning to ensure overall success. Failure in any technology implementation can be quite costly, so it’s important to ensure that you have done your due diligence and set up your team for success.

1.  Set Concrete Goals: Clearly identify goals and success measures. Clearly outlining these prior to implementation of any technology is crucial to the entire process; this way you can hold your software vendor/partner accountable as you go through the process. Let them help solve your business problems, not just implement new technology.

2.  Line Up Resources: Ensure that you have the right amount of staff and the right people with the skill set required to manage the project from your end. The best technology implementations start with ensuring you have the right people involved on your end that own the entire process.

3. Don’t Skimp on Training: This is the most valuable type of professional services $’s that you will ever spend. While most people think they won’t ever use all the training an organization recommends, it is never enough. Your employees will be utilizing these systems daily and ensuring they have had the appropriate amount of training is key to overall success.

4. Communicate to your Staff: New technology can be a scary time for your employees; they may think they are being replaced by this new technology, so it’s important to be extremely transparent with the goals and business problems that the organization is attempting to solve.

5. Hold Your Technology Partner Accountable: While there are many things you can do to ensure your success, it’s important to hold your technology partner accountable for the same success measures and goals. Make sure they have a Customer Success Team that’s the main goal is to ensure that you are seeing maximum solution/technology value and that all your success measures are being maintained and met. Nothing is ever completely stable when it comes to ever-changing technology, but if your technology partner has a team dedicated to setting goals, actions, and plans, you can be sure that their success relies almost 100% on yours.

TAKE YOUR TIME!  While you don’t want to drag your feet when installing/implementing new technology, you don’t want to rush to the finish line either. Ensure that you have identified the business problems to be solved with the new technology, make sure your team owns parts of the process, and enjoy the ride.