What is a “turn-key,” or “turnkey,” solution? Well, according to Investopedia,
A turnkey solution is a type of system built end-to-end for a customer that can be easily implemented into a current business process. It is immediately ready to use upon implementation and is designed to fulfill a certain process such as manufacturing (in part or whole), billing, website design, training, or content management.[i]
Sounds ultra-attractive, does it not? Indeed, I would speculate that a majority of software systems laying claim to “enterprise,” “all-in-one,” or “total portfolio” management have a marketing campaign that includes at least some element of the assertion that their product(s) can present fast and comprehensive solutions to any of the management problems plaguing your organization.
But there’s a major problem with such assertions, and it’s contained right there in the Investopedia definition, the part about “built end-to-end for a customer that can be easily implemented into a current business process.”[ii] Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this particular customer has already put in-place a management strategy that has taken into account the axiom “Quality, Availability, Affordability – pick any two, “ and has correctly read the business environment for the selected strategy. Let’s also posit that the turnkey solution selected represents the optimal technical approach to whatever management information deficiencies are perceived to be afflicting the organization. Note that these are two HUGE concessions, but I’ll grant them anyway.
What about the implementation strategy?
This is a door that the inexperienced (or naïve) Information Technology (IT) Project Manager will open into his face, over and over again. The standard template for “implementation” usually consists of the following steps:
- The group or team struggling with insufficient management information will call on their organization’s Information Technology (IT) department.
- The IT team will interview users and other stakeholders, and become fluent in any procedures or requirements that pertain to the problem.
- In larger organizations, they will see if an analogous problem has been addressed and satisfactorily resolved within that division.
- If no readily-available nearby solution is uncovered, they will seek out other companies within the same industry who have laid claim to having overcome this problem, and don’t mind bragging about it (why on earth would they brag about it? Check out the numerous paper presentations at PMI® Congresses, or local Chapter meetings, essentially boasting about the particulars of the successful completion of some gee-whiz project.).
- Should no suitable candidates pop to the surface, they will seek out analogous problems outside their specific industry, and see if any solutions exist there.
- At the end of all of this investigation, they will prepare some kind of position paper with the requisite Executive Summary, Technical Discussion, Recommended Solution(s), and Conclusion paragraphs, all pointing to what they hold to be the answer, often some form of a turnkey program.
- After upper management has signed off on the solution, funds are allocated for “implementation.” This involves purchasing the software, installing it on people’s computers, training those same people, and announcing the date that everyone’s expected to employ the solution,
…and it rarely, if ever, works as advertised. Sometimes it doesn’t advance the correction of the original problem enough to justify all of the effort expended in the previous seven steps, but abandoning the solution isn’t considered viable, due to the (invalid, of course) sunk costs argument. As the Team responsible for correcting the original problem becomes associated with the failure, blame invariably gets directed to those personnel who were responsible for collecting the solution’s data, usually tinged with the flavor of bitterness that comes from failing to achieve sufficient “cooperation” from the host organization. A new IT Project Team is engaged, and the cycle begins anew.
So, how to avoid this vicious cycle? Recall Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management # whatever, that asserts my very own variation of the Pareto Principle, that the 80th percentile best managers who have access to 20% of the information needed to obviate a given decision will be consistently outperformed by the 20th percentile worst managers who have access to 80% of the information so needed. Based on this rule, it’s vital for PMO Directors to abandon the notion that a turnkey solution represents the optimal approach, once the necessary organizational cooperation is attained, the data is collected and entered into the package, some switch is flipped, and the 100% solution gets delivered to inboxes everywhere. My view is that it rarely works that way, regardless of software vendors’ claims.
The way these things do work is along the lines of…
Ooops! Look at that. Out of pixel ink for this week. Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion of Beware the Turnkey Solution.
[i] Retrieved from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/turnkey_solution.asp on June 12, 2022, 12:05 MDT.
[ii] Ibid.
