In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Stu Cook, Product Marketing Manager, Cority, explains what organizations should consider when planning to buy EHS software.
This clip is taken from a webinar titled What Buyers Wished They Knew Before Purchasing EHS Software, which is available for free on-demand here. This webinar is sponsored by Cority.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Cook: Let’s start by talking about organizational readiness. This is a pretty self-explanatory term. It just means is your organization ready to take on the project you’re planning and have you thought about both the knock-on effects and how various decisions will impact the rest of your organization, not just you or your team.
There’s a pretty famous statistic that’s mostly attributed to Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey that states around 70% of software projects fail. This obviously includes far more projects than just the implementation of EHS and ESG software.
I’m not trying to instill a sense of doom and gloom, but this underlines that a lot of people will see the need for new tools as the starting point for buying something new. When in reality, there is so much preliminary work that your organization should be undertaking well before pulling the trigger and deciding on a vendor.
Something that I will say over and over again: what is the problem statement or what are you trying to do? For every problem in life, there are countless ways to solve it, and that very much applies when it comes to EHS software. So ask yourself, what is the problem we’re trying to solve and what secondary problems come with it?
You can very easily get carried away with dozens of problem statements that aren’t as easily connected as you might think. Adding too many problem statements compounds the difficulty of getting them all solved in a phase one of software implementation, which will not only impact the effectiveness of the solution, but it will impact how your organization views the solution.
Keeping everyone on side is absolutely essential for employee engagement and the success of the program. It doesn’t matter if it’s EHS, ESG, or anything software, that rule applies.
Speaking of too many problem statements, how many people in the audience have it? The experience of a stakeholder jumping on a project and saying, “Oh, this could solve my problem, too.” I also understand it can be really easy for me to say, “Don’t let people do that.” But in reality, a lot of people just let other stakeholders come in and take a project and twist it.
So how do you combat it, you might be asking? We will talk more about the phased approach later, what that means, but essentially taking the opinion of your fellow stakeholders into account is very, very important. Everyone should be brought along for the ride, but they should understand that the singular problem statement we were talking about earlier is essential to ensuring success from the get-go.
Ensuring you’re capturing and assessing everyone’s opinion, but ensuring everyone understands that the problems can be managed in phases, starting by facing the most critical issue and evolving to keeps users engaged but not overwhelmed is really, really important. So I encourage you to bear that in mind as we go through.
A really great tool that can keep individual contributors engaged and ease the push and pull of these projects is a business case. Business cases keep the entire organization focused, outlining the core objectives being met and can also ensure that those have been at an executive level, have a clear understanding of the value that is being achieved throughout their investment.
We speak at length about how you can create a top-notch business case in previous webinars at Cority, so I would encourage you to go explore Cority.com/webinars for specific content. But this content ties in the final bullet on this slide.
Organizations like Cority don’t get to be market leaders just through creating and providing technology, though it does help. Market leaders will be able to help you navigate organizational readiness. For example, Cority’s team features solutions consultants who come from industry having sat in the shoes of those people that are doing this process. And they’ve done this process on both sides countless times.
So one of my first tips of the day, ensuring organizational readiness is a battle unto itself. But the best in the business will help you prepare, outline where you need help, and then they will give you that help. The very, very best won’t be afraid to tell you to hold off on your purchase until certain things have been ironed out, and they’ll help you get there instead of leaping at the chance to just sell you something.