Software ROI expectations

One of the new metrics we are attempting to put in place where I work is what I call the 3-6-3 rule.  Some of you old enough to have some gray in your hair may remember that this is a direct steal from the old banker's rule - borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, on the fairway at 3pm.  Those days are long gone.

No, our rule has to do with how quickly we can design and build, and how quickly our customers can deploy and receive benefit from enterprise or workgroup software.  The rule stands for:

6 months - start to finish, we want to try to limit any software release that we build to 6 months or less.  If the development gets longer, we are apt to miss a technology or business window.  We need substantial functionality, but not at the risk of bloatware or delayed releases.

3 months - how long it should take, start to finish, to deploy our enterprise and workgroup productivity and innovation tools.  I've been in the ERP death marches and no one wants to go back to very long software deployments.  The faster a customer can implement and deploy a meaningful solution, the easier it will be for them to accept and embrace the solution.

3 months - how long it should take for the software to pay for itself.  Many firms had a hard time justifying their investments in software.  We want to build software that will provide a meaningful benefit within three months of the completion of the deployment.  No one wants to wait for a return on investment on software any more.

By the way, our consulting arm has a similar mantra.  We want to deploy packaged software for productivity and innovation that can be installed and fully deployed in three months or less, and will demonstrate a real benefit to our customers in three months or less after deployment.  This means that those solutions have to be simple to deploy and easy to learn, but also solve an important problem for our customers.

We believe software can improve productivity, but we as consumers of software and designers and developers of software need to set our own metrics and live up to them to encourage our customers to believe that software can provide a return and a benefit.

Comments

[T]

I am definitely a proponent of 'practice what you preach'. I applaud your company's 3-6-3 plan.

I prefer software companies that create smaller releases more frequently. It is easier for me to adjust to the changes implemented in the software (often I fail to explore all the functionality of the larger releases).

When designing a product, we often get too caught up in creating the perfect product. Customer feedback is invaluable, but not every piece of feedback needs to be implemented immediately. To keep from obtaining 'bloatware or delayed releases', push feedback to future releases that fall outside of the scope of the current release.

Good luck implementing your plan, in my experience, that is an ambitious goal.