She Owns It
Portraits of women entrepreneurs.
Earl Wilson/The New York Times Susan Parker: “Too late.”
At the last meeting of the She Owns It business group, Susan Parker talked about the frustrating process of switching to new software to run her company, Bari Jay. After more than a year, the project, which was supposed to take three months, is still unfinished — although she hopes the new software will be live within a month. Although she likes the software, with hindsight she says that she would never work with this particular software development company again. But where does that leave her now?
The software company’s co-owner, she said, is “the most laid-back person” — although, she added, “he wasn’t laid back in the sales process.” The co-owner, who is based in the Philadelphia area, meets with Bari Jay at its offices one day every month or two. When he’s there, Ms. Parker said, she observes no sense of urgency. For example, he once took a 30-minute cigarette break before addressing a glitch she had called to his attention. “If he worked for me, he’d be fired by now, but I can’t do anything,” she said.
Beth Shaw, who owns YogaFit, asked whether Ms. Parker thinks the software company co-owner even understands his own system, given that he seemed more focused on sales.
“He knows his system inside and out,” Ms. Parker replied, “and I think he even knows my system pretty well.”
The group considered what, if anything, Ms. Parker could do to address the problem at this late stage.
“Some software implementations have sort of staggered payments, so you don’t make the last payment until it’s live,” said Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour.
“We did that with our Web site,” said Ms. Shaw, who talked about her site in previous posts.
“Too late,” Ms. Parker said. She paid in three installments during the three-month time period that the project was supposed to last. “Then, all of the sudden I was like, maybe I shouldn’t have paid them,” she said.
“Exactly,” Ms. Shaw said.
On the plus side, Ms. Parker said, the software company knows that the monthly payments she began making in November won’t continue indefinitely unless the software goes live — soon. “They’re also hoping to go after more bridesmaid and bridal companies,” she added.
“Referrals,” Ms. Lord said.
“If it’s working for my company, there are like five other companies on my same old software,” she said. The software firm would only have to make minimal modifications going forward if it took on those projects.
“The conventional wisdom is every technology project takes two or three times as long, but yours blows that,” Ms. Lord said. “I’ve heard a lot of people tell the same story with different technologies.”
Ms. Parker said she’s learned a lot from the process but doesn’t plan on switching software again for a very long time — if ever. She said it’s become “embarrassing” to give the same status report every time she attends one of her Entrepreneurs Organization meetings. Yet no one there can think of what she might do differently.
Although she stays on top of the software company, she said she must ultimately rely on them to do what they say they’re going to do.
Any suggestions? How has your business dealt with “laid back” technology vendors?
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Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/when-software-vendors-take-their-time/?partner=rss&emc=rss