The Secret to Easy Document Management

Focus on Your Business Needs Not System Features

If you are looking to implement an easy document management solution, and your first question is” Does it have this feature or that feature?” you are already going down the wrong path. We’ve seen this time and time again; people focus on features instead of focusing on business process improvement. Once and awhile, we do find an organization that does need a specific feature. It’s more likely however, that we will have the feature, spend way too much time talking about it, only to find out that they never use that feature when they actually implement the system.

Business Focus

Focus on your business needs. That’s the most important key to a successful implementation. The vendor matters. The technology matters. But without the correct focus, nothing matters. Too often we see document management designed by committee that doesn’t include the business users. The result of this type of “group think” is usually a system that does many things poorly.

It is important to have input and buy in from the users in the organization. The users know what they need, and they need to adopt your new system. This only happens when they are involved in the process. Another type of “Group think” happens when you have technical staff who turn the project into a technical project or when you have multiple vendors working with different departments. This creates the dynamic where everyone wants something that they heard about. Sometimes, what they want is mutually exclusive. Other times, what they want has nothing to do with solving the original business problem that the organization faces.

Prioritize Problems

To implement an easy document management system, simply pick the problems you are trying to solve. Lay them out and choose the priority for your implementation.  Make sure your vendor knows about all of the projects so they can plan ahead when implementing either the base system or the first project (typically called a pilot project). This will make the entire process seamless and efficient, resulting in a system that delivers results immediately.

When you are prioritizing the different projects, have your vendor help decide the order. Based upon experience, they may guide you to: a small pilot project, a project with a big ROI, a project with key staff members who will take a leadership role or a project that will be highly visible throughout the organization. There are reasons to prioritize projects and your document management vendor has experience picking projects that will lead to long term success.

Now that we’ve defined the keys to success, we can now take it to the next level with Business Process Automation.