The other day I spoke with a financial services vendor who was apologetic about returning my call a week late. While delays like this can cost business, I didn’t notice. It was an important call but not urgent. And yet what she said next perked my ears up.
“Our corporate office rolled out a new computer system,” she explained. A new call tracking system or customer management system was deployed. Something bad happened, everyone was confused, services were disrupted. The company rolled it back and replaced it, temporarily maybe, with the original.
This vendor is highly intelligent, professional, and a pleasant person whom I am likely to refer to others. And this is exactly why a bad deployment – supposedly invisible to customers – may cost her company outrageously more than necessary.
As an outsider I don’t know the details but I wonder if this could have been avoided.
Deployments are never perfect and issues will always come up. My vendor may not have known what the issue was, what the new system was, or when it would be resolved. I could hear her eyes rolling over the phone.
Or, if she did know then she was not provided with facts and narrative appropriate for the public.
What costs did the company just get saddled with? Putting aside the original costs of planning, deployment, and support, these unexpected costs just landed with a thud on the CFO’s desk:
- Cost of rollback: Staff time, operational interruption, redeployment of old system, tests to ensure integrity of data stores
- Cost of lost sales, missed prospects, and frustrated customers
- Communications fire-drill: The phone is ringing with anxious associates across the country who do not have the tools they expect to serve their customers and bring in revenue. Expensive call center engagement with long individual phone calls. Emails and web posts, perhaps a press release, video message from the CEO, or even just a generic message flashing on the screen. But even that generic message takes time to write, edit, proofread, submit to legal review, rewrite, re-review, route through other departments, and then post it. All of which is pure cost.
- Clean-up for whatever the issue was.
- Redeploy and hope for the best.
- Repeat from Step 1.
Don’t let your next deployment go sideways. We all get captivated by the next shiny new object (looking at you, Notion and Airtable), so be sure these steps are on your list.
- Talk to your stakeholders about what they need and where they are struggling.
- Think about where you want to go. Need to save IT costs? Shorten the sales cycle? Better compliance? Be sure that intent is baked into the reason for rolling out a new system.
- Deputize a small group to see what features are needed and be sure the UX makes sense. Have them help evangelize the new system to their own networks.
- Test it! Beta test it! Beta again! What Greek letter comes after beta? Do that!
- Communicate systemwide the rollout timeline. Don’t schedule the rollout for right away but allow time for people to absorb what’s coming.
- Send out a FAQ, readable documentation, how-to posts, short videos.
- Only then deploy the whole thing.
This is the non-techy part of the deployment. It was most visible to me this week because my vendor was not informed and not prepared to face her own customers. She still delivered professionalism and courtesy, so I hope she doesn’t get saddled with more cost than that.
