Our team has brought IT to Life for thousands of customers over the years. We’ve seen and experienced just about every possible scenario along the way and we wanted to share some of our valuable knowledge with you. Here are The Top 5 Help Desk Software mistakes a customer can make when implementing. Hopefully, we can prevent you from making some of them yourselves!
1. Failing to Start Off On the Right Foot
Your project is important to you. It represents a great investment – in terms of both time and money – and making sure it starts off right is crucial. Always make sure your base environment meets or exceeds the minimum requirements. You wouldn’t put junk food in your body and then wonder why you’re feeling sluggish, would you? Give your product what it needs to be healthy and it will respond in kind. And just like a healthy lifestyle, it’s much easier to start off right then to try to fix it later!
2. Negating the Importance of an Executive Stakeholder and Communication Plan
Change can be difficult for some people and you’ll likely find yourself fighting resistance at some point. Showing everyone that Senior Management supports and endorses the project can be the difference between success and failure. The communication plan will help make sure you have availability to the relevant teams, the proper system access necessary for the engagement, and can help make sure you have any change approvals necessary in place and ready to go when you are!
3. Not Effectively Dealing With Processes
Many times customers are focused more on understanding the new product first and how they work second. At least one person should have a thorough understanding of your current process from beginning to end before you embark on this journey. Understanding why and how you do what you do can help identify those areas the new product can improve and which ones need to be emulated. The last thing you want to do is change everything all at once. While you may want to change some of your processes in conjunction with the new system, very rarely do we recommend changing all of your processes at the same time as implementing a new system. Keep what works, improve what you can – but do it slowly and phase in new processes so that each change can be evaluated independently. And make sure everything is documented!
4. Trying to Emulate a Previous Product
The flip side to Number 3 is trying to implement a solution based on another familiar product. While you don’t want to change everything all at once, there are those customers who go out of their way to try and make their new solution do everything their old system did. It’s a waste of time and money if you’re just going to fit a new, innovative product into the old paradigm. Along the way, you may identify areas of missing functionality –no two products are exactly alike and that’s a good thing! Focusing on those things detracts from understanding the features you didn’t have before and all the possibility THOSE bring. Remember, there’s a reason the change was required and focus energies on the positive aspects.
5. Sacrificing Services to Save Money
This is the biggest mistake any customer can make! Everyone is budget-conscious but services can help SAVE you money with a much faster ROI. It can also improve user acceptance – making the project smoother. Asking employees to take on implementation while learning a new product AND keeping up with their current jobs is more than they can chew. Work is done in a haphazardly, quality is sacrificed for quantity, and all of this creates a strained and unhappy working atmosphere while taking longer than it would have if with an expert. Your chances of success are immensely improved with professional services and that’s an expense you just can’t afford to not make!
If you need help with your implementation, check out our Training and Services options, or contact us and let us know how we can help you. We hope you found these Top 5 Help Desk Software Mistakes to avoid helpful.
