Can you really do away with Excel sheets?

Once you have the process in place, got the budget approved and have identified the list of products, you will next focus on product fitment. This is the wooing phase; I like to call it the honeymoon phase. The business teams have this great vision and you have a line of vendors promising you the world and more. Practicality, budget limitations and other nasty impediments arrive later as the project gets closer to the contracting phase.

However, you can make the most of the positive vibes flowing in this phase if you keep in mind a few simple things:

1.Prioritize your needs. Have a clear idea of which parts of your process are in critical need of technical enablement. Then go for the solution / product that excels in those areas. A good-looking, state of the art product with advanced features is of no use if it can’t deliver on the basic needs of the process.
2.Have a long term view. You will be investing in the product anywhere from 3-5 years. So think about how your organization and your business process will evolve in those years. Find out if the product is scalable and flexible to accommodate your growth and process changes.
3.Get the actual users to be part of the process. More often than not, the decision making on a new technology remains restricted to senior HR managers and the IT department. Making the actual end users part of the process will give a real picture of the usability of the product as well as make change management a lot easier when the product is finally rolled out. The only caution here is bear in mind that users can some time get into the nitty-gritties of the process which can become too detailed and can take the focus away from big picture.
4.Keep the big picture in mind. Think about your organization’s overall technology landscape and strategy. At the end of the day, systems have to work together to make the organization tick. Ensure that the new technology will interface well with the remaining systems and can send and receive data as required.
5. And finally, be practical. Don’t try to achieve much more than what you need. Your users are not going to get rid of excel sheets and will continue to use them. In fact, no other tool till date beats the convenience of getting a data snapshot in a spreadsheet for analysis and error checking. So expect some part of manual processing to remain and do not aim for a system that can run on autopilot.