Don’t buy that IT system if…

Some warning signs to avoid technological mediocrity.

1. You don’t know who it’s for.
2. You dont know what problem it’s solving.
3. You know what problem it’s supposed to be solving, but you’re not sure it’s an actual problem.
4. The people who are going to use it most haven’t seen it.
5. It looks like it was designed in 1998.
6. It only works on one type of device or a weirdly specific version of Internet Explorer.
7. It doesn’t have the functionality you want now.. but it’s ‘coming soon’ in a future release… honest.
8. There’s zero evidence of a product roadmap (a real functional one, not a static fictional one in the sales brochure).
9. The user group is steered exclusively by the largest, highest paying customer.
10. It doesn’t have an API.
11. They have locked-in ‘partners’ for certain integrations (good luck trying to get it working with anything else).
12. You’re unable to freely access your own data.
13. It’s written in something only the American Military used in the mid-90’s.
14. They want to you to sign a multi-year contract & part ways with a huge pot of money up front before anything has been delivered.
15. There is no potential early exit strategy.
16. It’s a BIG BANG implementation.
17. You’ve only ever seen it work smoothly with fictional demo data.
18. They won’t do a proof of concept.
19. They do a proof of concept, but it doesn’t entirely work as proposed… but you’ve been given assurances “the actual live system totally will”!
20. They seem a bit hazy on the whole project management thing.
21. Every time you email them, you get an out of office.
22. When you ask for best practice in any given situation the response is “It can do whatever you want!”.
23. To get it to do whatever you want you have to pay upwards of £1K for each and every minor change.
24. Any changes have to go through a severely bottlenecked development team.
25. Nobody is allowed to talk to the development team, not even your account manager.
26. “Best of breed” is said an alarming amount of times.
27. They keep saying the word Agile, but you get the distinct impression they don’t know what it means.
28. They’ve got loads of swanky case studies. Derek the IT Guy says it’s saved him loads of money. No mention of users… at all, anywhere.
29. Sales person insists “It pretty much works straight out of the box!”.