How to Put Together the Right Team to Plan a Business Application

Let’s say that your business is ready to start building a business application software system.

Or maybe you’re ready to change your enterprise-level software from a major vendor.

Do you know that one of the first decisions you make will determine the success of the entire project?

It’s the decision of who from your business will be a part of your software strategy team.
* If it’s just your IT specialists, you’re probably going to fail.
* If it’s just your C-level executives, you’re probably going to fail.
* If it’s just your designers or creatives, you’re probably going to fail.
* If it’s just your software developers, you’re probably going to fail.

So how do you put together the right team? Let’s zoom out and look at your business to find the answer.

Your business is a complex organism, with people performing different roles. You may have multiple people in certain roles like IT or customer service or sales. Or you may have one person filling multiple roles in the organization.

Either way, you have a lot of different perspectives on what your business needs and where you business can find value.

You need all these perspectives at times. But if you get them all at the same time, it can slow the progress of a project to a crawl. That’s especially true with a change-management initiative that aims to improve an existing business process.

Of course, adding business application software is a big change to your business—and so you run the risk of paralysis by over-analysis.

So instead of having all of the perspectives in the room, you need to start your software upgrade with the right perspectives in the room.

The stakes are high. At Worthwhile, the business application projects we start have an exponentially greater chance of success than the industry average (as found in the annual Chaos Report). One of the ways we do this is by having the right perspectives in the room during the planning phase, so that the strategy behind the software build is sound.

This means that the Open Source Technology tenet that “the right people are the ones in the room” isn’t exactly right. Instead, you need to get specific types of expertise making this decision—and get them in a balanced ratio.

Our years of experience working successfully with clients shows us that the strategy team for business software should include three roles:
1) An expert in business strategy

2) An expert in technical capabilities

3) An expert in user experience


Let’s break down each of these roles in detail, and find out:
* What the role is 

* Who might fill it

* The benefits of including this role in the process

* The risks of excluding this role from the process

* The problems of having only this role in the process


Expert in Business Strategy

What the role is 

This is the person on your team who focuses on building a business case for the software project, and identifying the KPI that will measure the ROI of the project.

Who might fill it

CEO, COO, business unit VP

The benefits of including this role in the process

This perspective ensures that your project has a rock-solid business case. He or she will help to identify the ROI of the project, and indicate how to measure that ROI. Because of this emphasis, this person will often be the one who gets management to open the pocketbook and push go (if he or she is not in management).

The risks of excluding this role from the process

If business strategy is not represented at the table, you are likely to end up with a software strategy that does one of two things:

1) Creates a scope that is far bigger than the cost and/or timeline that can be justified by ROI

2) Creates a solution that fails to address the core business problem or opportunity and therefore lacks lasting impact

The problems of having only this role in the process

Often, the business leaders at the table have extremely aggressive goals for timeline and/or price that aren’t realistic given the organization’s technical capabilities. 


Business leaders also have a tendency (at least at first) to focus on their message or sales pitch, instead of on customers and other system users. They need to be balanced by user experience experts who ensure that the system works for all key user groups.


Expert in Technical Capabilities

What the role is 

This is the person on your team who focuses on the technical capabilities of your project in terms of software development, network hosting, IT, and security needs.

Who might fill it

CIO, IT, lead software developer

The benefits of including this role in the process

This perspective ensures that your project is planned in a way that can actually become reality. Good technical people will also bring new possibilities to the table, which can bring more impact to the final application.

The risks of excluding this role from the process

If technical capabilities are not represented at the table, you are likely to end up with a software strategy that does one of two things:

1) Has unrealistic expectations in terms of timeline or features and functionality delivered at the expected price point

2) Spends too much time on the latest and greatest front-end flashiness at the expense of valuable core functionality

The problems of having only this role in the process

Technical people tend to be extremely tactical. If those tactics are not balanced by an overarching business strategy, you can easily end up with a long, drawn-out process or a series of agile loops that never make any real progress toward a measurable business-level goal.

Technical people can tend toward sacrificing form for function, in a way that limits efficiency and user satisfaction. These things add real value to a system, and so they shouldn’t be ignored.

Expert in User Experience

What the role is 

This is the person on your team who focuses on the user experience of your project in terms of interface design, user flow, and information architect.

Who might fill it

Creative director, art director, information architect, UX architect

The benefits of including this role in the process

This perspective ensures that you keep your users in mind, which results in software that creates value and/or makes life easier for them. A good user experience thought leader also knows industry-wide best practices that will impact user expectations now and in the future.

The risks of excluding this role from the process

If user experience is not represented at the table, you are likely to end up with a software strategy that does one of two things:

1) Focuses more on what business wants than on what users want. 

2) Fails to make sense of software functionality, rendering it unusable without a steep learning curve or training investment.

The problems of having only this role in the process

If left unchecked, user experience designers can add so many flourishes to the project that the price skyrockets. They need to be balanced out by technical experts who know what is feasible in terms of software development given the scope and timeline.

User experience cannot be the end goal of a project; it needs to be a tool that contributes to business strategy and measurable ROI. User experience experts may be reluctant to make tradeoffs necessary to meet the measurable ROI goals of a project.

Three Addenda

1) It is possible to have one person play multiple roles during this process. For example, your business strategist may also be your user experience guru. This usually works best on companies with smaller teams. When this happens, the person in dual roles needs to be disciplined about engaging both sides of his or her brain, in order to make sure the planned solution is balanced correctly. 

2) Unique projects may require subject-matter experts to be included in this process. For example, for a data-heavy project, you may want to include a data scientist on your core software project team. Use your discernment about who to include, and try to keep the team as small as possible.

3) Just because a person, role, or perspective isn’t on the strategy team doesn’t mean they are never included. You can reach outside your team for research, user testing, and more. However, it’s important to remember that these people are brought in for a specific purpose and a specific timeframe. Listen to them well, and then make decisions with your core team. Otherwise your project will grind to a halt because of conflicting feedback and scope renegotiations.

In Conclusion: What If You Can’t Cover All Three Areas? 

Larger businesses will likely have in-house experts in all three of these key roles. But that’s not always the case, especially for smaller businesses.

If that’s the case for you, your business needs to find trusted partners to fill in the gaps. This could be a consultant or a software partner.

A word of caution here: Don’t give your consultant too much influence. Remember that a consultant who fills one role is just one perspective. That must be balanced against the other key perspectives in project planning.

The same is true in a software partner. If your software partner fills the technical capability role, it has one perspective that must be balanced against the others. The right software partner for your company will embrace this fact—or, even better, will bring balanced expertise in all three areas.

Regardless of how you to get a balanced perspective, make sure to get there as you begin the process.

The success of your business software depends on it.

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