WorkflowMax Implementation 101: Scope Your Business

So you’re looking to use WorkflowMax in your business …? Good decision, now comes the critical part: Implementation!!

One of the most important things to think about prior to any software migration or implementation is to scope the requirements.

Questions

As part of this article I tried to think about the questions you should ask yourself as a business who wants to start using WorkflowMax as a job or project management system. The more I think about this, the more difficult it is to know without asking questions in more detail, and knowing more about your individual business but here's some starters below ...

• How do you bill jobs out (hourly or project based, or some other combination)?

• How many different items (costs, not labour based) do you sell?

• How many tasks do you bill out (i.e. design, development etc.) and how are the rates for these decided?

• How many customers do you have?

• How many invoices do you produce per month?

• How many PO's do you produce per month?

• How many suppliers do you run PO's for?

• What is the monthly turnover?

• How many staff do you have in the office?

• How many staff do you have in the field?

• What accounting program are you using now?

• What quoting method do you use now?

These questions above will give you an idea of the size of task in moving your practice or agency onto WorkflowMax, but the next thing to think about is the workflows and methods that you currently have in place, as well as where your data and information is held.

Workflows

If you have workflow diagrams within your business then this is a brilliant time to dust them off and make sure they are up to scratch. If you don’t have them, I can’t recommend doing them now highly enough.

There are sites such as Lucidchart where you can design these up for a very low fee (even free if they are small enough).

However, you should consider that you may have to change processes as part of this merger, as information will be handled in different (and often better) ways. Just because you’ve done something a certain way in an old system for 15 years, it doesn’t mean it’s the only, or best, way to do it going forward.

Current Data

Next, where is your data and information at the moment! This is sometimes the toughest question to answer because all too often it’s “in our directors head” and there are no policies and procedures around what happens in the day to day running of the agency. That said, most people have some kind of master system for each area of information, even if it’s Microsoft Outlook for contacts, your accounting program for items and suppliers, or something else along similar lines.

Next Steps ...

So now you should have a map of the current processes within your business, an idea of where the information is going to come from, as well as a scope of how you want your new WorkflowMax job management system to handle your data in the future. This is everything you need to get a good implementation up and running, and now it’s on to the fun stuff - Setup and Admin! (which Dan will talk about next week).

WorkflowMax implementation partners will get you set up for success from day one. Get in touch with a WorkflowMax implementation partner to help you get everything up and running smoothly.