Over the 26 years I have been providing consulting through our Professional Services team, I have identified a few easy tips for saving time and money as well as ensuring a successful investment.

Be Prepared

Work with OpenText to understand any prerequisites which need to be satisfied before starting the Services. This includes the following:

• Identifying internal stakeholders, sponsors, and supporting staff - without their involvement and support there cannot be success.
• Providing physical and network access for the OpenText staff as appropriate
• Procuring servers with the correct OS version for the products being implemented.
• Installing and configuring any prerequisite software
• Procuring databases on a supported RDBMS with any appropriate character sets or other configuration details as needed.
• Establishing any networking elements needed in advance. This includes DNS aliases, firewall rules, VIPs, WIPs, and Load Balancers.

Get Training

Obtain training for your primary support staff prior to your services. This enables your staff to be even more prepared to participate during the engagement and allows tasks to progress more quickly. The reality is that your staff will have to get the training one way or the other - either through official training or through mentoring during the engagement. The per hour cost of training is about 1/3 of consulting services and provides a worry-free environment in which to learn.

It is also important to avoid letting the new knowledge get stale - so try to stay active with the software soon after receiving training.

Be Active Participants

At OpenText, we want to enable you to be successful and independent. Take the opportunity to be as involved as possible with the implementation to facilitate knowledge transfer to your staff. Executive management needs to be supportive of the implementation to ensure adoption and success. Stakeholders should be aware of the implementation plan and educated on the benefits. Success should be evaluated by early adopters and key support staff.

Manage your Investment

It is unfortunate when companies pilot an implementation but fail to launch it with users right away. This typically leads to a repeat of the same implementation services at a future date. It is important to take the appropriate steps before, during, and after the services to ensure that momentum is not lost. Your implementation needs to continue to grow to meet your users' current and future needs. Make sure you take what you learn in training and through your services engagement and use it to keep your implementation current with software updates and relevant.

To make this process easier, stay active in OpenText events, User Groups, OpenText/Micro Focus Community Website, Special Interest Groups, and/or internal user groups within your own organization to better understand users' needs as well as product capabilities.

It is also important to address any problems users encounter quickly so simple problems don't fester and lead to poor adoption. Work with the OpenText team as needed to ensure success for your organization.