Should You Make It Or Buy It? —We chose the… Buy answer, this is time for setup! — Ep. 5/6
The goal is to tell you our story through the make or buy journey as a feature team at Doctolib. It’s meant to be practical and give you insight to at least convince you to ask yourself this question and ideally to accelerate your own make or buy journey by taking advantage of our experience. The story is divided into a series of episodes, one for each main step of our adventure. I hope you will find it interesting! Happy reading!
Here is episodes’ list if you want to quickly jump on the one you’re interested in:
Do the setup by yourself with only guidance from the software vendor in order to learn and become autonomous as soon as possible.
While solution pricing negotiation was on the end, we worked on 2 topics:
- Who do we choose to support us: the software vendor or a software vendor partner?
- What can we prepare to set up the solution and begin as soon as the contract is signed?
About who does the support, we had 2 choices:
- Support by the software vendor directly with their professional service
- Support by an external partner recommended and certified by the software vendor
Whoever will support us, we wanted it to be a light support.
There is no best choice between software vendor professional service and external partner, it depends on your needs and vendor & partner proposals.
The software vendor support is not necessarily the best as its job is mainly to build the best solution whereas the service provider job is to provide the best service possible. Note that there can be advantages working with the software vendor compared to working with an external partner as the software vendor consultant is connected to all the software vendor team so he should be able to easily ask questions to other relevant consultants or to the product / support team directly.
Ask and assess the profile of the consultant that will work on your project.
In order to know for how many years she/he is in the company, how many years of experience she/he has with the tool and with which customers she/he worked with. The profile of the consultant working with the partner can be better than the one working with the software vendor and vice-versa.
If you’re not satisfied with the profile suggested, ask for change. It’s your right to choose who you want to work with. You don’t want to work with the last consultant recruited that just got its training, its value added will be low for you (I know it’s not cool for her/him, he had to begin, but very coldly, you don’t want it to be with you).
We studied both options and we chose support from the software vendor because of:
- Lack of precision in the external partner’s answers during discussion or forgot to answer some of our questions. It didn’t give us enough confidence
- Too many consultants suggested in the proposal compared to our needs. It generated incomprehension compared to the proposal of the software vendor and a feeling of “we give you as many resources as possible” and lack of accuracy in the answer
Pay particular attention to discussions: they must be perfect.
They should shine and impress you as they put one of the best persons of their teams to work with you during this phase. If the discussion lacks precision, reactivity and proactivity, it’s not a good sign for the setup itself as they usually put less resources, expertise and energy for the steps after contract signature.
Prepare the material needed to do the setup while discussions are in progress.
You didn’t need to wait for the setup to start to begin to prepare it. We knew what documents we had to produce in order to review it with our consultant as soon as the setup had begun. We took advantage of this time to iterate on the documents and review them internally to reach a good first version.
Execute the setup with strong project management principles.
As soon as the contract was signed for the solution and the support, we began to work with the consultant to do the setup.
We executed the setup with as guidance a shared planning with software vendors including stream, owner, ETA and as governance a 30min weekly meeting to report progress about the roadmap, each stream and discuss blocking points and next steps.
Roadmap was the high level overview of the setup progress (month granularity).
We divided it into streams with an owner that reported progress during the meeting.
I recommend you to consider the consultant as part of your team and include her/him in the weekly meeting.
Communication will be better and the consultant will be more efficient and motivated. When needed, we also did daily meetings with the consultant for a short period.
Consultant suggested a methodology to follow to do the setup. It is interesting to work on it with her/him in order to use it while adapting it to your context and timeline.
Setup to go live lasted 6 months.
We had little knowledge of the tool before setup began and the expertise level from the software vendor was not as expected so we unfortunately did a lot of tests and learn.
Good news is that we developed a good knowledge of the solution internally that allows us today to be autonomous. If you have an existing solution, don’t unplug it right now, wait for the new solution to be live for several months to take the time to assess it, it is always good to have a possible fallback in case of a major issue with the new solution.
Overall, from first contact to go live, it took us roughly 1 year.
I know, it is huge! If you had asked me before how much time it would take, I would certainly have told you 6 months. It was the first time I did this kind of study and I was only half time on it so there’s room to go faster🙂Also for the time to set up and go live, it depends on many dimensions: complexity of the existing / new solution, internal dependencies, importance of the solution for internal / external users etc. So don’t be afraid, it’s the duration in our context, don’t let that hold you back!
Now we begin to measure the gap crossed between our internal solution and the new solution.
We think of capabilities that were far in front of us that are now within our reach and this is amazing, it’s like traveling to the future. We have the impact we wanted to have, just 1 or 2 years before. By the way, it creates a short blank page syndrome to anticipate 😉
To conclude, be as demanding with the partner you choose as when you were when you wanted to choose the solution. Don’t underestimate the setup time, I would even say, overestimate it. Consider the consultant as an internal employee, cadence the setup like an orchestra conductor with a good level of slicing, clear ownership and governance and the setup will be a success! (but if it is not the case don’t blame me 😀). In the next and last episode, I will try to give you the main insight of our adventure, talk to you soon! 🎉
The purpose of the article is to present and share the work done by Doctolib’s tech team. The information contained in this article is provided for information purpose only (on an “as is” basis with no guarantees of completeness or accuracy) and does not constitute any legal advice, nor has a legal value. Therefore, it could not contradict in any manner whatsoever with any legal binding terms applicable to your relation with Doctolib
