If you work on IT projects and have not heard about Marketecture before this is a must read for you, Marketecture (Marketing Architecture) is a very common technique that most of vendors use to market and sell their products, in Marketecture, marketing people use the architectural advantages of a product to tout it and influence the client’s decision to buy the product, often times Marketecture is planned in the very early stages of the product planning and prior to the product build, as a project manager you have to protect your project from Marketecture, read on to know how Marketecture works and what precautions you can take to avoid falling in the Marketecture trap.

Marketecture is a trap that most of clients fall in, basically it is part of the procurement stage which is one of the most critical stages for any project, if a wrong or an inadequate product or technology is selected this will have a great impact on the project, and unfortunately the vendor does not realize the trap until the implementation reaches its crux, and sometimes the projects gets closed and the client does not realize that he already selected the wrong product, because the detection of selecting a technology/product over another is a highly event-driven process, it means things can go smoothly and also if the project gets complicated it is very likely that the client will find out the problems associated with the technology selected during procurement stage.

The following cartoon strip shows a real life example of a Marketecture incident, it is about a fictional company in which a project is underway and this project requires some integration with the HR system, so during the procurement stage and prior to the project start, an integration technology has been selected which was getting Marketected by the vendor and eventually it has been selected by the fictional company, but later on and during the project build, the project team failed to do the integration, despite all the support calls with the vendor, and ultimately they could find a free open source software that easily could verify the integration requirements, let’s see this conversation between the chief architect, Chief Information Officer ( CIO ), and the marketing manager of the fictional company

I have spent some time to create this strip to show how Marketecture works in action, and alas this happens in real world! So how to avoid falling in the trap of Marketecture, what precautions and preventive actions you can take to protect yourself and your project, this is what we will see in the next section.

10 Ways to Avoid the Marketecture Trap

1. Hire a Consultant

Often times the client does not have the subject matter expertise of the the new product to be purchased, even if the client has a big technical experienced team, so one of the secrets to avoid Marketecture is to hire an independent consultant to act as an advisor, while this will involve some cost but this will save the client too much money which could be the whole investment budget!

2. Do not Trust Technical Team too much

If you have a technical team do not count on their opinions too much, and you have to validate their recommendations, the reason behind not blindly trusting your technical people is that, and perhaps you have experienced this yourself, most, not all, technical people suffer from the following (with all my due respect and continuous appreciation!):

• Have very high tendency to learn new technologies and try new products
• Tend to do things the hard way, sometimes involve egoist behaviours
• Love complexity and with complexity comes experience and experience is the bright side of problems!
• Basically do not care about cost nor return on investment

Listen to the technical team but do not take their recommendations for granted.

3. Delphi Technique

This is related to way #2, it is a proven way to get experts advice about technology, forecasting, estimating cost and time, or any other matter of argument, the main advantage of this technique is that you do not gather all experts in one meeting room and let them express their opinions about the new product you are trying to purchase in a collaborative interactive discussion or sort of brainstorming session ( in fact Delphi is the opposite of Brainstorming ), it is not like that, likewise said above about a technical expert character with regard to ego, this will result in arguments and no consensus will be reached, and this may even be worse if the participants practice negative or black politics! So Delphi can be achieved using one or all of the following ways:

• Prepare a good questionnaire and disseminate it to technical experts let every expert fill it alone
• Have a separate meeting with each expert, ask about previous similar projects or initiatives the expert has worked on before, try to see what is getting said behind the words, of course through the body language, conclude whether the similar project was a success or failure!
• Send vendors’ or bidders’ proposals along with evaluation criteria template and let each expert fill it alone, later on you can verify the evaluation results, if you find too much difference in evaluation results, try to understand the judgement behind this with each expert separately
• Meet vendor A get information from him about vendor B’s product shortcomings, most of times they are competitors and possibly hate each other, use the information you got from A to negotiate with B, likewise when you meet B get information about shortcomings of A’s product, and the cycle goes on with A, B,…., Z!

You can read more about Delphi Technique on Wikipedia

4. Independent Analysts

Independent analysts release reports about most, if not all, products and technologies on yearly and sometimes quarterly basis, they often address certain vertical industry products, for example health care, or specific technology, horizontal, such as Document Management System, and a report is getting released which evaluates the product/technology in place from each and every aspect you may think of, so you can eventually have a 360 degrees of what you are evaluating and this will have a drastic impact on the client’s vendor selection process, if you already had no chance to examine an independent researcher report, you can start by either Gartner or Forrester the two leading independent researchers, the subscription is quite expensive, even for individual reports, you can get a four pages PDF report for $3,000+. Like I said before whatever you spend during procurement will save you lots of money if you fall in the Marketecture trap! It is also worth mentioning that leading vendors pay utmost attention to independent researchers’ rankings and they always try to impress, in order to get highly ranked, indeed an independent researcher’s rank for a product can have a great impact on a vendor’s sales performance, you also can hire consultants from these independent analysts (refer to way #1).

5. Independent Case Studies

A lot of vendors offer case studies, always successful!, about their products and technologies, and you can learn too much about what you are evaluating or trying to purchase through those case studies, however it is not advisable to base your entire evaluation on those case studies provided by the vendor under evaluation, you also need to look for independent case studies, through other channels, I strongly recommend spotting an initiative that is as similar as possible and preferably within the same industry of the client and trying to examine lessons learned and whether the product proved to be capable to achieve business goals or not.

6. Avoid Best of Breed

When it comes to products there are basically two categories, Best of Breed and Best of Class, best of breed is the best available product in a certain industry such as an HR system, while best of class is best of class! the class would be a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), best of class does not necessarily have to be best in each and every aspect, for example, it can be best in terms of price but does not support multi-lingual user interface, and so the client has to compromise one aspect which sometimes will never be used, the problem is that most of people picks best of breed without doing objective analysis whether it is required or not in the first place, again here I have two tips for you:

1. Best of Breed can be influenced by technical people, for them to puff up their resumes with prestigious leading brand names and learn about new products
2. Often times, Independent Analysts put best of breed at the top of the list, and you have to avoid blind selection

The bottom line is that, even though you have too much money to spend, while I doubt so in current recession, do not take the best of breed unless you finish your evaluation and you conclude that it is perfect selection not perfect product!

7. Ask for References

Having worked at both client and vendor’s side, I can tell that asking for references is one of the most effective ways to judge a vendor, vendors always starve for good references because they do know how important they are, once they spot a good prestigious reference they keep spreading it around to all new clients, that’s you in this case, and it is likely that the reference will give you good feedback, also the reason why this is very important step to take is that, the angry client will never keep his anger and will clearly tell you about the real experience right away, chances are that they will be reluctant to tell you about the real experience in the beginning however with some good communication skills and potentially a visit you will get what you want and save yourself, your project, and your organization a big hassle of buying a bad product or engaging with a poor vendor, here is my tip to you, always for not less than 3 vendors having small, medium, and large business size and preferably within the same domain of your organization.

8. Ask for POC and POT

Proof of Concept (POC) is one of the most effective ways that can save you too much hassle, a proof of concept is a stripped down version of the product you are evaluating, it will give you an indicator about the capabilities and maturity of the product in question, while some vendors will try to get money out of conducting a POC to avoid losing the effort spent on it in case they do not win the deal, you will need to use your negotiation skills to tackle that, in contrast a Proof of Technology (POT) is to assess the capabilities of the product under evaluation against certain criteria or feature such as performance or security, ideally you will need to coordinate a POC for your key business users and a POT for your technical team, if only one option is available I would urge you to select the POC and leave the POT because POC is very specific to the business problem while POT is a bit general and you can get to know about those details either through independent analysts or directly through the vendor.

9. Purchase ALAP

This one is one of my favourites, as you know most of vendors offer trial versions of their products, you can start with the project and defer the purchase of production licenses as late as possible (ALAP), this will give you ample time to assess the product and keep the biggest investment to later time when the team gets confident about the product, however some vendors may not offer this model, so here is the workaround; you can purchase only development or build licenses and buy production ones only when the build phase is complete, nice one huh?

10. Take Your Time

herein the final way, Take your time, do not rush, make sure you select the right product/ technology before rushing into selecting one product and leaving another, also try to question the existence of sole and preferred vendors and technology providers that may be mandated by your organization, check with other project managers who dealt with those vendors, get a list of lessons learned it will really help you, and now WISH YOU ALL THE BEST!

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• Why Projects Fail – Procurement
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• Why Projects Fail (Part Three)
• Why Projects Fail (Part Two)
• Why Do Projects Really Fail?