Select: What would you do differently next time?

For those at the selection stage (N=6), experiences seemed to be similar to those at the identification stage. Five respondents reported some learnings here – one response was “nil”. The keywords here appear to be: scope, engagement and benefits.

Echoing the previous findings, one respondent commented on the importance of having a clear “scope of requirements… at the beginning of the project”.  In a similar vein, another highlighted the importance of improved “user requirement definition and user engagement”.

Getting into a little more detail, another finding was the need to put some effort into separating the “selection of social software from selection of the document management system”. This may open a number of questions in this field – is it better to get a range of compatible tools from one vendor, or is it better to get the most suitable of each type of tool regardless of vendor, and then attempt to make them work together? A potential question for another survey, perhaps!

In another reflection on the maturity of the market, another respondent found that delaying the project would have been better – the “product space still seems crowded and immature”.

Our final respondent found that there should have been more focus on business benefits during the business case development, showing “how the solution will improve current processes”.

And so our key take-outs at this stage? It appears that we can repeat one from the last stage:

• The introduction of collaborative systems takes time, and needs a strong focus on the needs of people.

… and we can add:

• Be very clear on each part of what you need, and how the parts will work together.
• Be clear on what you expect to happen when you put a new collaborative system into place.