Designing a new system — especially one that spans the entire client experience— is a big project!

In this guide, you’ll learn how to select software tools and build processes that align with your team and customer’s needs:

Note: This is written from the perspective of a being in a digital service business such as a digital agency or IT consultancy.

The size of the team really depends on how big the company / division is. At the minimum, you should have an individual from each of these core areas (keeping in mind that sometimes a single person can fall into multiple areas): an owner, driver, stakeholder, and super user:

In this phase, you’ll determine the tools & business flows of today and what you’d like them to look like in a new solution. Then, you’ll find out what your team members are doing today and what their ideal work day / week / year would look like in a new system.

Time & Expense billing for a Business Consulting Firm (Visio)

Today: Take an inventory of the tools and processes your team is currently using to do work . These tools normally fall into three buckets: 1) Business tools such as Asana, Harvest, Google Apps 2) Craft tools such as Sketch, InVision, Photoshop, Sharpie 3) Personal / periphery tools such as Moleskin to-dos, Workflowy, calendar app.

Now look at the Pros and Cons of each. Let’s take a look at Asana

Future: Now, it’s time to design the ideal workflow of how the internal team will operate and how you’d like to service your clients. Some common tools to use are Mural, Lucidchart, Keynote, Visio, and Sketch.

Web Development Studio’s Services & Operations Workflow (Lucidchart)

IT Consulting Project Reporting Process (Sketch)

Bookkeeping and CPA Firm (Draw.io)

User-based workflowsYour goal is to determine the daily life of a team member and what they need to do in order to be successful. You can think of each team member (user of the system) like a part of the company’s body — the heart, the lungs, the veins. Like a vital organ, each person in a company has their own needs to produce the desired output to help the entire body function.

You can phrase these user needs using the following sentence formula:

As a [person], I [need], so that [personal / company success metric].

Now that we’ve determined our basic structure and user needs of today and what we’d like them to be, it’s now time to start the search.

Put together a Software Search Google Sheet on Monday to start collecting information on reviews, features, and company stories. You will use this to refine your research from about 20 vendors to hopefully around 6 this week.

Review sites are for collecting a large list of similar software names in a list. And that’s where reviews site’s usefulness tends to end. Often, they are put together by people not experienced in the industry or reviews are paid for and are skewed towards 5 stars.

Though, review sites are good for red flag comments — ones that warn a certain user type, a poor experience, functionality that was promised on the website but didn’t perform in the application.

The most honest reviews sites aren’t actually review sites; they are:

Stat compiling a list of feature categories that you’ll need such a project management, time tracking, and utilization. We are just looking if the software has it or not. Best found under “features” on the customer’s website. YouTube is another good resource for skimming through features. The 30-minute overview demos tend to be a good resource because they are showing screenshots and workflows. (watch double speed or click in 1-minute increments). Lastly, New features can usually be found on the blog or on their support site.

Beyond the software, it’s important to know about the founding of the company and where it is heading. While it might be the best option today, it may be trying to move into a new category away from your core business, or it just got purchased by a private equity firm and no new development is happening. LinkedIn and Wikipedia are good places to start if their About Us page is too general.

Friday Meeting

Have an internal meeting Friday afternoon. Take the 20 or so solutions that you found and narrow down to 6. Don’t forget to put your Status Quo in your comparison — it’s always a viable option, especially if you can upgrade / augment with add-ons, API, and/or new processes.

Moving into week 4, we are not quickly testing the solutions. The goal here is to test for basic match of your process and user needs while getting a feel for the UX.

The Driver will sign up for a trial. If the software doesn’t offer a free trial, they will usually have a request demo or request a trial. In that case, fill out the form: they are trying to screen you (have a quick call) to make sure you’re a good fit for the product. Once a sales rep reaches out to you, ask for a trial so that you “can come to that initial call knowing more about the product.”

If they don’t let you into a trial, this is a red flag. All leading SaaS solutions offer a trial because they want their customers to be best equipped to make the right decision… and choose to stay with them for every month thereafter.

The Driver should block off an hour for each software. Don’t worry if you don’t finish certain things like setting up a project or invoicing the customer — this is a blitzkrieg on the software. There’s no expectations for how far you get. And remember, not all software can do everything, so it may not be you.

This is what you’re trying to do:

In week 5, we’ve tested the software for a week and will hop onto a screen share with a small number of software vendors that have past the tests of week 4.

Create a software evaluation document at the beginning of the week which includes everything we’ve found so far: current process and tools, current and future ideal user stories, and our notes of on this software.

Share your the internal team (we have the owner, the driver, and a stakeholder in the process by now) as well as your potential vendor’s sales rep.

Send this document to everyone before the call so that they come prepare and so the vendor’s rep can answer any questions or address concerns before the call.

Software Evaluation Google Doc

Screenshare through Zoom.us (my favorite), Uber Conference, Join.me, or GoToMeeting. You’ll have two tabs open, your Software Evaluation Document and the application you’re trialing. Share your screen so that you can have control of the conversation.

Friday Meeting

Repeat for Option 2 (30 mins)

https://asana.com/guide/help/organizations/members

The Evaluation Document has now gotten bigger.

After the first day of evaluation, send a survey to your team, similar to this one. Or, you can just share them on the running document (but it’s getting big, so it might be confusing).

If you can answer the questions, then great, answer them, or go over to their desk to help them out. If it’s too complicated, share the vendor’s sales rep on the Google Doc for them to answer inline. If it’s too complicated for that, table the questions for the group Q&A later this week.

While your team has started using it for real, it’s still just a trial. We’ll also want to talk to another company who is actually using it for real. The best place to find this company is through the software company’s case studies page. Look for companies that are most like you — provide the same service, were relatively the same size when starting, talk in the same way, moved from the same tools, were trying to fix the same things.

When you’ve found that fit (let’s say that Big Blue Digital is that match), ask your sales rep to speak to the main person in the case study (Brendon, the CEO). They will do an introduction and you can spend a few minutes talking to that person. You’re looking for red flags here — so ask them about the red flags that you’ve found in your own evaluation: a user story that’s not fitting, a piece of your process that doesn’t fit in the software.

The last step in week 7 is to sit down with your internal team and the software company that you choose to review the goals for the new system, the timeline, the people involved, and any data migrations needs you have.