Procuring Web Based Services
October 12, 2012 4:22 PM Subscribe
Your team or department has found a great web based tool for project management that costs ~$10 per user per month. What are the hoops you have to jump through to get management to ok the purchase? What could the software developer do to make the purchasing decision as simple as possible for you as a team leader/member?
Best answer: What are the hoops you have to jump through to get management to ok the purchase?
Depends hugely on the management. What kind of service and/or software costs are they most familiar with? "Enterprise" (where a besuited sales type comes in and there's a complicated per-seat/CPU licensing model and certification stuff and annual conferences with schwag bags) or "small biz" (Adobe Creative Suite, etc.) or "free"? A management team that's okay with signing off a five-figure sum for an enterprise licence on something may actually balk at a $10-per-user-month service, and it's sometimes better to say "this is going to cost [accumulated amount] over three years".
(That said, you also have to convince them that the $10-per service isn't going to go away in six months.)
More broadly, the pitch has to be cost vs. benefit: if you can say "well, we could build something similar in-house, but it'd take X person-hours, or we could work with what we have now, which is costing us X person-hours in inefficiency", and you have decent data to back it up, then you have a case.
(And yes, shiny.)
posted by holgate at 5:01 PM on October 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
Depends hugely on the management. What kind of service and/or software costs are they most familiar with? "Enterprise" (where a besuited sales type comes in and there's a complicated per-seat/CPU licensing model and certification stuff and annual conferences with schwag bags) or "small biz" (Adobe Creative Suite, etc.) or "free"? A management team that's okay with signing off a five-figure sum for an enterprise licence on something may actually balk at a $10-per-user-month service, and it's sometimes better to say "this is going to cost [accumulated amount] over three years".
(That said, you also have to convince them that the $10-per service isn't going to go away in six months.)
More broadly, the pitch has to be cost vs. benefit: if you can say "well, we could build something similar in-house, but it'd take X person-hours, or we could work with what we have now, which is costing us X person-hours in inefficiency", and you have decent data to back it up, then you have a case.
(And yes, shiny.)
posted by holgate at 5:01 PM on October 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
Best answer: Write a business case:
Detail the current system's drawbacks, and quantify the associated costs.
Explain how the new tool would be an improvement over the existing system, and what the financial benefits would be (e.g. "We currently spend X number of person-hours doing Y, at an estimated cost of Z; with this tool, we would spend X number of hours at a cost of Y, saving Z dollars.)
Know that there will be costs associated with ramping-up and/or switching over (training, etc.) and include those in your estimates of when management will see a return on their investment.
Anticipate other issues (convincing developers to use a new tool, concerns about reliability/down time of the service) and provide explanations and/or solutions for them.
At minimum, you need to explain what is wrong with the old way, why the new way is better, and where the money is going to come from to pay for it.
posted by stefanie at 5:03 PM on October 12, 2012
At minimum, you need to explain what is wrong with the old way, why the new way is better, and where the money is going to come from to pay for it.
posted by stefanie at 5:03 PM on October 12, 2012
Best answer: I don't know if my situation is typical of your ideal users or not, but the hurdles I'd have to jump through would be two-fold:
First, I'd have to sell my IT people on this versus whatever competitor they are more familiar with. You'd have to be able to meet their security and interoperability standards, whatever technical concerns they might have. We might even have to have an internal argument about who pays if this causes issues that IT has to solve, if they are really worried about this.
Second, you'd have to convince me that it was worth going through the pain of arranging an ongoing payment arrangement, rather than writing up a one-time purchase order for software. This isn't insignificant, because budget codes switch yearly, so I'm going to have this as an ongoing part of my life for as long as this lasts. Those reasons need to be good enough that I can then convince the people who will share my budgetary pain, and who will bring up perfectly reasonable concerns like "What happens next year if the budget is cut? Or what happens if there is a two-month federal shutdown and some of our funding is held in limbo and we can't process the payments?"
posted by Forktine at 6:12 PM on October 12, 2012
First, I'd have to sell my IT people on this versus whatever competitor they are more familiar with. You'd have to be able to meet their security and interoperability standards, whatever technical concerns they might have. We might even have to have an internal argument about who pays if this causes issues that IT has to solve, if they are really worried about this.
Second, you'd have to convince me that it was worth going through the pain of arranging an ongoing payment arrangement, rather than writing up a one-time purchase order for software. This isn't insignificant, because budget codes switch yearly, so I'm going to have this as an ongoing part of my life for as long as this lasts. Those reasons need to be good enough that I can then convince the people who will share my budgetary pain, and who will bring up perfectly reasonable concerns like "What happens next year if the budget is cut? Or what happens if there is a two-month federal shutdown and some of our funding is held in limbo and we can't process the payments?"
posted by Forktine at 6:12 PM on October 12, 2012
Best answer: Nonprofit voice here: I'd have to get it in the budget (reviewed at 6-month increments). It would help if you provided a free trial for a few months so that while I'm getting the purchase approved, we don't develop an "interim" solution and then become attached to it.
posted by slidell at 6:41 PM on October 12, 2012
posted by slidell at 6:41 PM on October 12, 2012
Best answer: Monthly, per user is a PITA. Price it at $495 annually licensed for how ever many users you feel is appropriate, $500 is a very common signing authority for managers.
posted by IronSurfer at 9:56 PM on October 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
posted by IronSurfer at 9:56 PM on October 12, 2012 [1 favorite]
Best answer: You'd have to sell us the server software and let us host it on our own, internal servers, with a ton of auditing, firewalls and checks, along with your written guarantee, that the data we enter on this server does not leave the company.
Because the project management data we enter on this server is confidential, and if there is any data leakage, we're going to sue your company into oblivion.
(software as a service does not work well for large, paranoid enterprises)
posted by meowzilla at 12:03 AM on October 13, 2012 [4 favorites]
Because the project management data we enter on this server is confidential, and if there is any data leakage, we're going to sue your company into oblivion.
(software as a service does not work well for large, paranoid enterprises)
posted by meowzilla at 12:03 AM on October 13, 2012 [4 favorites]
Best answer: I agree with Ironsurfer. Also make it easy for your business customers to pay. I have to jump through all kinds of hoops if I need to purchase something for work with a credit card. Make it easy to purchase with a PO with net terms and make annual subscriptions an option.
posted by jmsta at 5:49 AM on October 13, 2012 [1 favorite]
posted by jmsta at 5:49 AM on October 13, 2012 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
Include a ready-made business case, complete with a set of common ROI scenarios.
And then...
What are the hoops you have to jump through to get management to ok the purchase?
...Show management how shiny it looks.
posted by pla at 4:53 PM on October 12, 2012