In today’s fast-paced business world, having a strategic advantage is crucial. Companies are constantly striving to improve their processes, decision-making and overall performance. One of the ways to achieve this is by using strategic management software.
However, with the plethora of options available on the market, how do you choose the right one for your company? In this post, we will guide you through the process of selecting the right strategic portfolio management software to help your organization thrive. Also, enhance law enforcement capabilities with specialized software for police training.
What is a Strategy Management Software
But before getting to the heart of the matter, let’s explain first what the purpose of this type of solution is. Strategy management software helps companies align their goals, streamline processes, and improve decision-making. It provides tools for tracking progress, analyzing data, and enhancing collaboration.
How can companies benefit from this tool? These are some of its differentiating elements:
- Strategic Planning: companies can use strategy management software to streamline their governance and strategic planning processes, ensuring that they stay on course to achieve their mission and vision.
- Performance metrics tracking: These solutions typically offer robust performance metrics tracking and visualization capabilities, enabling organizations to monitor progress and make data-driven decisions.
- Gap analysis: companies can easily identify discrepancies between current state and desired future state, aiding in strategy planning and execution.
- What- if Scenario Analysis: What-if scenario analysis: organizations can assess in advance the possible outcomes of different strategic decisions and scenarios, thus improving decision-making processes in areas such as project prioritization, resource allocation or financial management.
Assessment checklist: what to check before purchasing strategic management software
But how can you determine what´s the right Strategy Management Software for your company? By just searching on the Internet, you will find several options that may be suitable for you.
But beware, the decision is not that easy, here is the 7-step process to decide the best tool for your business without dying in the attempt.
1. Understand your company needs
Before diving into the sea of options, it’s essential to evaluate your company’s unique needs. You will need to consider factors like company size, industry, and PPM maturity assessment. This last aspect is especially relevant, as it will enable you to evaluate your current Project Portfolio Management capabilities, identifying strengths and weaknesses in your existing processes and practices.
Then, you need to create a list of the key functionalities you require, such as:
- Strategy roadmap
- Project scoring.
- What-if analysis
- KPI and performance tracking
- Project Portfolio Management
2. Ease of use and training
Once you start asking for demos or free trials, the first thing you need to make sure is that the tool is easy to use. You don’t want a software solution that your team will struggle to use. Evaluate the usability of the software and whether it offers adequate training and support resources.
One of the aspects you should pay special attention to is the user interface. While complex software can lead to resistance in teams, a clear and intuitive interface can help users adopt the tool.
3. Customization options
Every company is unique, and your strategy management software should be too. You should evaluate whether the tool can adapt over time to your company’s specific requirements.
The flexibility of the solution is important, but it is not the only factor to consider. As your business evolves and grows, the software must evolve at the same pace as your business. So, make sure the solution is scalable and can handle more and more data and users.
4. Integration capabilities
What tools do you use in your organization to manage strategy planning and execution? Excel? Microsoft Project? Jira? Teams? Salesforce? Your strategy management software should integrate seamlessly with these and other existing enterprise tools and systems, such as CRM, ERP and other critical applications.
Make sure the software offers an open API, so you can easily integrate it with your existing IT ecosystem without a lot of back-end development work.
6. Vendor reputation
In this day and age, and with the opportunities offered by the Internet, would you buy any kind of product without first checking user reviews or the seller’s reputation? Of course, you wouldn’t.
Research the track record of all vendors you are going to talk to, read customer reviews and analyze case studies. You can even consider contacting existing customers in a similar industry to yours to get their opinions and recommendations.
And be sure to check software review portals such as Capterra or G2 for feedback and reviews from users who have already used the software. Their feedback will be by far the best insight you will receive to make an informed decision.
5. Security and Compliance regulations
You should also ensure that the software aligns with the specific regulations and compliance standards applied in your company. Make sure that the tool and software vendor are compliant with regulatory requirements and certifications in your industry, such as ISO, GDPR, etc.
In addition, you should also verify security measures and data privacy protocols with each software vendor, making sure that the solution uses encryption to safeguard your data from potential threads.
7. Support and maintenance
Last but not least, you should clarify with each vendor what level of support and maintenance they offer. This is crucial not only to solve problems and ensure the smooth operation of the software, but also to make sure that they will continue to support your company over time.
There are many examples of software vendors who, for various reasons, stop investing in their solution and cease to release new versions or features of the product. If so, the software would become obsolete in a few years, and you would have to look for a new alternative soon after. Therefore, we advise you to carefully review the service agreements of each provider to get an exact idea of the support you will receive.
Conclusion
And that’s it. You can see it’s not an easy process. But strategy management software is essential in today’s fast-paced business environment. Why? Because it will help you streamline processes, improve decision making and increase overall performance.
You’ll find that there are many tools on the market, but very few that, like Triskell Software, bring together, in a single interface, strategy execution management and project portfolio management capabilities, so that all levels of the company can benefit from the same tool. Want to learn more? Visit Triskell Software’s website and learn about all the solutions that this Enterprise PPM platform has for your business.
