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Sat, 17 July 2004
Ask the hard questions of the software vendor's reference customers
Adam Kalsey, faced with the familiar task of talking to a software vendors' reference customers, has written a list of things you should ask. He prefaces his list with this insightful comment:
When interviewing references, people don’t often know what to ask other than non-specific questions about how they like the product and how good the vendor support is. This is certainly the information you want to get, but unless you ask specific questions, you aren’t going to get specific answers.
Kalsey recommends questions like:
- What did you learn during the implementation that you would have liked to know before you started?
- If you were doing the implementation again, what would you do differently?
I learnt this lesson in journalism, though I still struggle to put it into practice: if you want the truth, you have to ask about the detail. People who referee potential software providers, like those who referee potential employees, know things that can help you. Your problem is that they've made a vague agreement with the vendor to say nice things about them. Your opportunity lies in the fact that it's a weak agreement: no money has changed hands, and the referee hasn't actually promised to only praise the product in all its aspects.
So the referees will tell you what it does well and what it does badly, where it will delight you and where you will have to live with shortcomings. But they'll want to talk abstractly. You must drive them into specifics, make them tell stories, ask them to step through scenarios, get a picture instead of a generic thumbs-up. Kalsey's list gives you a starting-point.
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