It When implementing a SaaS solution, firms can go one of three ways.  For all of these, a solution’s Ease of Use (EoU) matters for the bottom line in several ways.  By EoU I am referring to what level of skill and technical knowledge is required to use the solution.  Can a non-technical person deploy or enhance it?  Or do you need to hire talented programmers or AI experts?   So what follows is my review of these three ways, as well as why Ease of Use is always relevant.

Learn to Fish

One option is to do the implementation, enhancements and maintenance internally.  It should be obvious how ease of use matters.  The more intuitive the system is to use, the faster your internal team can build and deploy.  For this reason of course any free training is important also.  It leads to faster time to market, and starting the ROI sooner.  Not to mention the opportunity costs freed up.  By opportunity cost, I am referring to if your team is busy on one project, they are not available to work on any other projects.  The “opportunity cost” of working on Project A is you can’t work on Project B.

Hang With the Professional Anglers

A second is to start with PS (Professional Services) or their Partners, concurrent with bringing your team up to speed in the technology.  By PS I am referring to the Post Sales Implementation team from the firm where you are purchasing the solution.  By “Partners” I am referring to 3rd party firms that have a relationship with the solution provider.  Keeping the first method in mind, you can see how this hybrid plan also benefits from ease of use.  Same goes for the benefit from good documentation and free training.  The nice part here is that as a more experienced team builds out your system, your internal team can be reviewing what they build.  Reverse engineer the best practices so to speak.  Many wouldn’t put much weight in the Ease of Use for the PS/Partner side of this methodology.  They are quite wrong to neglect this.

Pay for the Fish

The last method is to hire PS or Partners to do all of the implementation.  Many stakeholders shrug their shoulders and don’t care about Ease of Use – or what working with the app is like.  The reality is that the more complex a system is, the more talented the consultants need to be.  Talent has a price.  So you’ll be paying more for the implementation, as well as having it likely take longer.  Time to Value is important on any project.  And of course if you decide to pivot to doing the work yourself you’ll certainly pay the price by picking a solution where the ease of use just isn’t there.

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash, cropped by author.