What a system costs after you buy it

We were sitting with the quote in front of us and he kept coming back to the monthly figure, which was genuinely reasonable. The licence is almost always reasonable. It is also the smallest number on the page.

The price you pay includes implementation, the data cleanup that implementation will expose, the integration to the system it has to talk to, the training, and the weeks when your people do their job twice because the old thing is still running. Everyone accepts those once they are listed. They are simply never listed.

Then there is the cost nobody writes down. Somebody becomes the owner. Usually it is whoever was most enthusiastic in the selection meeting, which feels like a reward and is not. Three to five hours a week in the first year, taken out of the job they were actually hired to do. I have watched a good operations manager lose a day a week this way and describe it, cheerfully, as no trouble.

None of this is an argument against buying software. It is an argument for comparing true numbers instead of quoted ones. My rough rule, from the projects I have run: for a company of this size adopting something that touches more than one team, budget two to four times the first year licence to reach a working state. If a vendor tells you it will be a fraction of that, ask who did the last three implementations at your size, and call them.

MMB