Getting It Right the First Time

My home page now includes a golden nugget I first heard 30 years ago at a quick printing association convention in my life as owner of a quick printing business.

"If you don't have time to do it right the first time, how will you ever find time to do it right a second time?"

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden taught that same principle. "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?" He added, "Be quick, but don't hurry."

That brings me to Vendor Risk Assessments and the 2024 Gartner Study on Software Buyers' Regret. An astonishing 59 percent of small business decision-makers with less than 250 employees stated that the financial blow from a bad decision on a recent software selection would significantly impact their long-term business performance.

59 PERCENT???!!!

You don't often see buyer's remorse like that. This most likely results from failure to perform proper Vendor Risk Assessments on not only the software, but the SaaS providers that gain such significant control over the parts of your business you put in their Cloud.

The top 4 reasons for their regret:

• 33% -- Higher than expected cost of ownership
• 32% -- Slow or difficult implementation
• 43% -- Problems in the handoff from Sales to the Implementation team
• 42% -- Mismanaged Expectations

All of those sources of regret could have been headed off with a proper VRA. However, that last one, "Mismanaged Expectations", has inadequate VRA written all over it for a process that involves much more than comparing Features and Benefits of competing solutions.

VRAs require due diligence, which can prove challenging to SMB IT Departments and other decision-makers with limited financial resources, knowledge and time to perform them. At a small business, those limitations often require taking existing staff off-task.

What did the businesses that regretted their software selections end up doing?

• 49% had to either cancel their contract or request a refund
• 33% had to go through the arduous process of replacing the software with another solution (that second time that SMBs have even less of)

Time, Knowledge, Money -- save on all of those limited resources by being quick, but not hurrying. Then, get it right the first time with a properly conducted SaaS Vendor Risk Assessment. 

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