Links

I have been working on a couple of software projects recently, and I have been reminded once again why IP management software implementations so often fail. So, I have come up with five (facetious) things any organization can do to doom its new IP management software to failure.

1. Hold-on to the past
Redesign your new IP management software until it works exactly like your old IP management software.

You need new software because the old has made it very difficult to do your job. It has become a problem in virtually everything you do. After literally years of struggling with it, you have finally built-up enough organizational will to go through the pain and expense of moving to a completely new platform. But, as we all know, change is difficult (see #4 below), and there is always a countervailing pull to return back to the familiar. There are always people who will oppose change, and the pressure to remake the new system in the image of the old one will quickly be overwhelming. Give-in to the urge, and start pressuring your vendor to “adapt” their system to your “needs”. This is the most effective way to make a project expensive and time-consuming. Most importantly, this is how you make really bad, bloated, and buggy software.

2. Delegate
If you want to end up with IP management software that can’t support your IP management, then don’t involve your IP managers.

Make sure that you assign the project to your lowest-level support staff. Remind everyone that these are the people that are directly responsible for most of what the software does anyway. Because these people have no real authority, they will never be able to consolidate the necessary resources (see #3 below), make essential changes to the organization’s management processes (see #4 below), or compel anyone to use the software (see #5 below).

3. Focus on the cost
IP management software should be viewed merely as another cost of doing business that must be aggressively contained.

Other major expenditures such as patent filing fees and management salaries are obviously investments which ultimately are expected to produce tremendous returns. In this light, make sure that you find the cheapest vendor, or if not, then make sure to bully the vendor you do select into subsidizing your implementation. Remind them that you are a very important customer and that, if they make you “happy”, their business will ignite with the white-hot fury of a thousand melting suns. Later, when you are shouting at them for “under-delivering” be sure to hang-up before they remind you that you paid them for only about a fifth of their actual effort. Although you have plenty of direct evidence that this is true, you must balance this with the fact that everyone knows software vendors are notorious scam-artists.

4. Don’t change a thing
Avoid making essential changes to your IP management practices and processes.

Obviously most of the benefits of your new software cannot be realized without matching changes in how you do things. Your IP management processes have to change, or they won’t be any better than before. (It reminds me of the TV ad where the people think that their life will change because they have new telephone service.) But once you start down that road it can lead to a lot of unsavory outcomes. It can even mean changing people’s assignments! Of course, this cannot and must not happen. Change must be something that occurs only in the abstract - in the “software” realm.

5. Don’t turn it on
Ultimately, the most effective thing you can do to prevent a successful implementation is to simply refuse to turn the new IP management software on.

The most common, and easiest to use, method for doing this is to tell the vendor that you are not “happy” with the software. If they get pushy and want to know why you are unhappy, or what they can do to resolve it, just tell them that the whole experience has been “bad” and that you don’t “like” it. Remember that most of the pain of moving to new IP management software is the change that it will cause (see #4 above) - the monetary cost is nothing compared to that. So, even if you have gone through all the trouble and expense of getting new software, rebuilding it to match your old system, and bullying your vendor into doing most of the work for free, remember that most of the pain comes after you “go-live”. Just don’t do it

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.