Rolling Out the Red Carpet

Your customer has been won over by your superior technology and has placed an order. It is an exciting time with high levels of interaction and everyone involved is in a positive frame of mind, anticipating, perhaps impatiently, the deployment of the solution.

The implementation team has been involved – to varying degrees – throughout the decision making cycle, but now they are front and center. All eyes are focused on them, and on how they will deliver what best-laid.

In many cases, this is where things may start to go wrong. The assurances made during the sales process may seem like stuff of fantasy when real-world issues are staring you in the face.

At 1touch.io, we understand that a successful deployment is fundamental to laying the foundation for a strong partnership for many years to come. This is one of our core values, and we achieve this by:

1. Having a realistic plan that meets the timeline of the customer, with achievable milestones that reflect true progress. Each milestone must show increasing value to the business;
2. Ensuring that the customer deployment team and the supplier deployment team act as a single team, despite potentially differing priorities. When you establish an equal partnership, you create a smoother working environment;
3. Always remembering that this project is just one set of activities in which the customer is engaged. Therefore, advance warning when milestones are at risk is critical. No-one likes to receive bad news, especially at the last minute, and no-one enjoys sharing bad news. However, timely and pro-active updates provide an opportunity to demonstrate the necessary integrity, and they allow the customer to adjust their plans as required;
4. Sharing our expertise for the betterment of the deployment. We teach, we don’t just do. For example, the customer might wish to accelerate a phase of the plan to show value sooner; but experience shows that the consequence of that change may be to push other phases past their deadlines. If the customer insists despite the cost, the changes must be explained, understood, and mutually acceptable;
5. Providing periodic updates to the project sponsors that are consistent, accurate, and actionable where necessary. It is very tempting to create separate update notes for the different stakeholders, but this never works. The supplier and the customer are one team and must have an open dialogue.

But even these best-laid plans do not always succeed. Why do some deployments not work out as well as hoped?