Progress Management

It is often said that procurement headaches do not end with vendor selection; they actually begin there. The IT industry is an excellent example for the validity of this principle. The product delivered is very intangible and difficult to define; thus, any mistakes (and obvious corner-cutting practices) on behalf of IT vendors tend to manifest themselves much after the system has been delivered, and the contract value has been paid in full.

Inspecting the development and deployment process by an entity not affiliated with the vendor is of paramount importance. Of course, this inspection could be done by experts or managers from the client organization. If you decide to go this route, be sure to answer the following questions:

• Does your expert have in-depth understanding of hardware and communication technologies (where applicable)? If your vendor promises to deliver a system with certain attributes, can you really verify these were met? Does your personnel understand server motherboard revisions, CPU steppings and cache sizes, routing buffering capabilities, firewall modes of operations and hundreds of others specific aspects of the product you are buying?
• Does your expert have industry experience with developing custom software? Do they understand the performance implications of choosing one technology or approach vs. another, such as PHP vs. ASP.NET, or Rapid Application Development versus a more classical, adhere-to-specifications approach?
• Can your expert ask for pieces of the product source code and put them up for the so-called "code review"? Very often vendors will promise that only their best specialists will work on your project; they will then put junior people who are often qualified just enough to "make it work" through putting in lots and lots of hours. This practice always backfires later on, when you discover that the system is very expensive to maintain
• Can your experts estimate how much work is a given extra feature? Changes and additions to the scope of a project are a fact of life with any software system. They are also a major source of additional revenue of vendors who quote a low price for a "basic" system and then place exorbitant markups on additions. If you don't think this happens, just go to a car service shop and add up the cost of the several thousand spare parts that, combined together, would make a $40,000 automobile – it is unlikely that you will arrive at a figure under $400,000 You can be sure this system works well with IT vendors too
• Can your expert ensure that no proprietary technology (except where absolutely necessary) went into the product? If the vendor goes out of business, you want your software and hardware to be designed in such a way that another vendor can take over the work without having to redo everything from scratch. And even if your vendor is large and unlikely to disappear any time soon, preventing vendor lock-in is still very important if you expect to use and maintain the system for many years at a good price

Reviewing progress and inspecting interim and final deliverables in the IT industry is a complex undertaking. Our consultants can help you with that phase of your project, by virtue of being independent and yet competent enough to look "under the hood" as often as necessary.