Adaptive Growth: Who We Serve

The companies we serve are mid-market manufacturers and distributors, usually with sales between $10MM and $250MM, but sometimes larger and sometimes smaller if circumstances warrant. We have been working with distributors and discrete manufacturers for well over thirty years.  We speak their language.  The kinds of service we provide could be of as much use to many other kinds of business, but we try to stick to what we know best.  We think very highly of focus.

It is a truism that initiatives to acquire and implement business technology (say, an ERP, CRM or SCM product) must be driven by well-researched statements of requirements; anyone who doubts that isn’t likely to be reading this.  But three aspects of this are often less than well understood:

• The mechanics of effectively translating strategic goals and objectives into usable, concrete statements of requirements.
• Stating requirements so thoroughly and concretely that no one could imagine that they were being fulfilled during implementation, only to discover later that they were not.
• Extending and evolving the statement of requirements beyond initial implementation, into the lengthy period of maturation, maintenance and incremental change that lies between major system changeovers.

It has been our experience over many years of participating in major software acquisition and implementation projects that the most common root cause of failure is neglecting to translate business objectives into detailed technical requirements.

Much is known about the process of software acquisition and implementation.  Much of the best work in this area (which we heartily endorse) is concerned with the structure of successful implementation projects, emphasizing the themes of risk management and requirements analysis.  Much has been made of the alarmingly high failure rate experienced by major software implementations. In particular, there has been an entirely proper emphasis (in our view) on the critical importance of grounding implementation projects in sound requirements analysis: the correlation between loose requirements gathering and implementation project failure has been demonstrated many times over (though it can’t be stated often enough, in view of the continued prevalence of failure). What hasn’t been made clear is twofold: the necessity for a company’s strategic goals and objectives to be seen as system requirements, and the practical means for doing that.  This is our primary focus when advising companies contemplating the acquisition and implementation of business software systems.