Three ways to accelerate your time to value in 2020 (and beyond).
Why is time to value important?
In order for customers to start generating revenue from their business software application, they need a reliable and robust way to ensure that the time between implementation and obtaining value from it is as short as possible.
Where does responsibility lie for achieving this?
Usually, the finger is pointed firmly at the application vendor and their implementation partners. In reality, we all know even if nobody chooses to acknowledge it, the balance of responsibility rests fairly evenly with all parties – software vendor, partner, and clients.
“But…” you say, “hasn’t cloud deployment made things easier?”. That was one of the promises of cloud technology, after all. The evidence suggests “not”.
Too many technology-enabled change programmes still struggle to deliver on their promise and some just simply fail. Whether judged on benefits delivery, or achievement of time, cost and quality, the rate of success is still lower than it should be. Historically, as even the latest research reports still highlight, in excess of 60%-70% of business application projects fail to deliver on their business case¹.
On one hand clients, software vendors, and partners are still struggling to deliver consistently, while vendors are constantly maturing, evolving and enhancing their products. Therefore, it’s crucial for partners and vendors to embed good delivery practices alongside the applications and technology, encompassing “agile”-style approaches to improve time to value.
However, everybody’s learning, maturing their practices; implementation project managers and their teams are adjusting to “cloud & agile” thinking. Most software vendors and their partners are struggling to turn isolated exemplars into pervasive success.
3 ways to accelerate your time to value
In order to help all parties to deliver consistently and decrease that all-important time to value gap this article offers three ways to accelerate your time to value so your business software implementation can start generating revenue for your business in the shortest time possible.
1. Align project standards
By aligning project standards across all your internal teams and partners you are standardising compliant delivery of vendor technology with every partner. You have control of certified methods and because you are following best practice - the best experience of how to deliver the project every time - you can benchmark performance and increase delivery confidence, thus minimising mistakes and rework.
2. Certify partner delivery
Certifying partner delivery increases sales confidence and partner mindshare resulting in better conversion of new and bigger opportunities. In Certified Partner Delivery projects your internal teams and partners follow agreed project blueprints. This means that more projects are delivered with fewer issues, using fewer resources, therefore, saving time and money. The outcome for the customer is a faster time to value and increased revenue.
3. Assure delivery
Reproduce the excellence of your best delivery. Enable machine learning throughout your project delivery lifecycle using blueprinting technology to generate continued insight into your project delivery method. Using this insight improves and optimises the delivery of your projects, focuses attention on priorities, manages risks early, guarantees compliance and reduces associated costs, speeding up delivery, thus accelerating your time to value.
A powerful partnership
To help Enterprise software vendors, partners, and their internal teams gain greater visibility and predictability across their cloud-based implementation portfolios and accelerate time to value in 2020 and beyond, Hydra is partnering with UK-based Searchlight Consulting.
The collaboration comes in response to clients, vendors, and partners struggling with a lack of visibility and to maintain a single joined-up plan for all parties, across all implementation projects.
UK-based company Searchlight Consulting has combined its expertise with Hydra’s asset-driven Execution Control platform to create a cloud-based implementation and knowledge management platform, capable of achieving more predictable, and successful implementations for its clients.
This powerful combination of an enterprise Execution Control cloud platform and integral expert services provides the requisite capability to increase vendor and partner project delivery success by up to 55%² and reduce “time to value” by 21%³, thus driving customer satisfaction, retention and improving revenue recognition. It also aims to achieve even more successful and predictable implementations of cloud-business application projects.
Improved customer success means better control of revenue recognition for “cloud-based” offerings – an important measure not only for day-to-day financial health but also company valuations.
Steve Sharp, CEO Searchlight comments “Over the years Searchlight Consulting has seen the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to working with clients, vendors, partners on the implementation of cloud-based enterprise solutions. These experiences led us to form our partnership with Hydra and develop our digital and integrated knowledge management hub. Increasing the success and certainty of implementations for clients reduces the time-to-value cycle, thus improves revenue recognition.”
Juan Manrique, CEO Hydra comments “We are very excited to be collaborating with Searchlight Consulting. The partnership is a fantastic opportunity to combine Searchlights expertise with Hydra’s cloud-based solution, offering clients, vendors, and partners a unique solution to accelerate the time to value of cloud-based enterprise solutions and digital transformation programmes”
Download the brochure to discover the benefits of Execution Control and how it can accelerate your time to value in 2020 and beyond.
