If you’re evaluating software, here’s one question worth asking every vendor.
Including us.
What happens in month four?
Everybody is great during the sale.
Everybody is attentive during implementation.
And everybody is especially attentive at go-live because go-live is visible and nobody wants to be the person whose name comes up in the postmortem.
Month four is different.
The implementation team has moved on.
Your internal champion is back to their real job.
The consultants are somewhere else.
And then the first real problem shows up.
Usually at month-end.
Or quarter-end.
Or at 4:47 on a Friday.
So ask:
Who is still assigned to us in month four?
Is it the same team?
Is it a support queue?
What does it cost?
What happens when we discover something we should have built in month one?
And what happens when we want the system to get better six months later?
You’ll learn quite a bit from the answers.
Sometimes you’ll learn even more from the pause before the answers.
Go-live gets all the attention.
Month four tells you what you actually bought.
Jim Rosenberg
President & CEO, NEO3
The Workaround — because every system has them.
