LTYM - Customizing to meet the need

Letters to a Young Manager

Customizing to meet the need, #54
LTYM > Project Management

Dear Sophie,

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The problem with meeting needs by customizing an off the shelf system is the long term costs. Aren't user needs more important, you ask?

I remember a CRM project where our consultant-led project team dutifully met with each user group and catalogued their needs and work processes.

We ended up with a specification that required customizing a fairly large portion of the core code. This was a double warning flag that we missed. As a result, less than two years later when the vendor released a major upgrade to their product, we couldn't implement it without first paying the large consulting cost of upgrading the custom code. We had to wait over a year until we could free up the funds in our budget. The long-term cost of customization was killing us.

We became a victim of our own needs. What do I mean? We never questioned our old business processes, arguing that the system should adapt to us rather than us to it. The height of hubris on projects like this ignoring that large systems with large customer bases don't represent best business practices.

The double warning was (a) the large portion of the system that needed customizing (30%) and (b) the low portion of business processes we first reengineered (0%). In an ideal world that's backwards. In a practical world, the portion of reengineering should exceed the portion of customizing every time.

***

Sincerely,
Ed

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Takeaways:

Don't modify core code

Discussion Questions:

1) Can you think of some exceptions when a system should be customized more than the current business processes? What's the exception to the exception?
2) If large, established systems represent best practices, how can they inform the analysis phase of a project, before the buy decision is made?
3) Do traditional RFP processes have a blind-spot with regard to this issue? How would you change it?

For Further Reading:

Michael Hammer, James A. Champy, Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, May, 1993