Often we hear the same questions from our customers:-
"Is our current tech stack driving growth, or is it holding us back?"
"Are our tools scalable, secure, compliant and cost-effective for the future?"
"Are our tools helping us work better together, or are they creating silos?"
As an Atlassian Platinum Partners, with a team of experts skilled in processes, procedures, and tooling across various industries, we frequently address this question. However, more often than not, this question transcends just tool or technology choices. It touches on strategy, culture, and the broader needs of the organisation, and this is where our bespoke approach provides value. Let’s explore this further…
Why tool choice is critical for organisational efficiency
Rapid organisational growth often prioritises expansion over operational efficiency and team needs. This frequently leads to a trade-off between quality and speed, emphasizing growth strategies above internal processes. However, technology and the right tools can play a crucial role in supporting and accelerating this growth.
When growth slows, the focus shifts to maximising efficiency. Consolidating the right tools can boost productivity, but poor choices can trap organisations in silos and ineffective systems.
Company culture heavily influences tool selection. Team preferences can lead to decisions driven by individual biases, rather than objective needs. Past experiences show that familiarity often dictates tool choices, potentially skewing decisions and bypassing thorough market research.
Our experiences recently
Here at Sourcesense we have completed several HealthChecks on customer's Atlassian toolsets, including Jira, Confluence and Service Management as well as all the integrating applications and third-party apps and found some interesting findings.
Statements and information found that have made us curious as to the ‘why’ include:
“my data will get lost…..”
“We have used this software for years, why would we change and impact our users”
“We can't change now as the historical data is critical….”
“I don’t like dashboards…..”
The challenge we face is that software selection and technology usage are inherently human processes. While we appreciate the role of AI in aiding tool selection and providing summaries and detailed solutions, its effectiveness hinges on the clarity of the requirements, expectations, and prompts provided. The choice of tools is frequently shaped by an individual's previous experiences, their level of technical maturity, their familiarity with processes and approaches, and their design preferences—consider, for instance, the distinct preferences of an Apple user versus a Microsoft user.
Let's Consolidate our tools
When looking to consolidate tooling and evaluate from a wealth of tools and opinions, we find the following checklist very helpful to validate the tools under inspection:
What ARE my needs – knowing what the tool is needed for and having agreed, and discussed requirements make the process much clearer.
How scalable is the tool – it's great having a small mobile app that meets your needs, till it crashes the moment that more the 10 people use it. (Some fun examples we have seen included a super Kubernetes clustering solution for multiple Application servers, that forgot the database couldn’t handle that many connections!)
Does the tool meet my Security needs – this is critical in modern organisations, where security and compliance is essential for running for an organisation. Identity provider integration is an example of huge growth in this area and adding new tools for security is now a norm.
Pricing strategy – It is important to know what the pricing mechanism and future strategy of a tool are – as this allows the evaluation and consolidation to be efficient and cost-led.
Ownership of tools – every tool in an organisation needs an owner, a person to validate its use and cost-benefit. Without this, tools are forgotten, and costs can spiral inefficiently.
But let's be clear – tool choice is super important and should have dedicated time and money applied to it – to ensure cost savings are made. Given the explosion in tools and technology, doing nothing is tantamount to falling behind.
We recommend
At Sourcesense, we recommend regular tool reviews. Doing a big tool review every 5 years creates excessive cost and inefficiency in this fast-moving market. It is recommended that a tool review process is initiated at least yearly, and a good process workflow supporting this can mean this is highly effective and repeatable.
Some feedback we received on recent tool and process evaluation work:
“Sourcesense's approach was not generic. They engaged with key stakeholders to gain a thorough understanding of our unique setup, ensuring personalised solutions tailored to our specific needs. This bespoke approach was instrumental in addressing our precise challenges and optimising our system effectively.” COO of a Corporate Legal Entity Data Provider
If you’d like to hear more or have us advise on why regular tool evaluation is important, drop us a line at international@sourcesence.com or drop me a line! Christine.Box@sourcesense.com