How to Prepare for a Professional Services Engagement

Purchasing software is a fairly straightforward process, but purchasing Professional Services can be a little more complex. The good news is, there are a few things you can do to streamline the process and get started sooner. In this blog post, I'll outline the process and some best practices for you.

Breaking Down the Purchase Process

When you purchase Professional Services, you are engaging a technical team to undertake a specific project, like an implementation, migration, or training. These projects usually have to be completed within a given time period. One of the first steps in the process is developing requirements for the project, which is a collaborative process between your team and an Isos Solution Engineer. 

Once the requirements have been established, they are converted to an estimate and a proposal, or a Statement of Work (SoW.) Once everything is agreed upon, the documents usually need to be reviewed by your legal team before they can be signed.

Once the SoW is signed, your project is scheduled based on both resource availability as well as your timing and needs. This means there may be several weeks between when you sign and when work can actually begin.

So how can you ensure a smooth engagement and the fastest start time? Following are a few ideas!

Gather Requirements

Give some thought up front to what Atlassian tools you are looking for, what problems you are trying to solve, and any special considerations that may be unique to your team's way of working. Isos has years of implementations under our belt, and we can definitely make recommendations based on past experiences, but we do not know your business, or your unique use cases yet. When you can identify some common use cases and requirements up front, it makes figuring out the details quicker and easier. This will reduce the time it takes to get an estimate put together, and make moving forward through the purchase process faster.

Prepare Legal and Financial Documents

Working through the details needed for the SoW may take a week or two. While this is underway, there's often an opportunity to get started on some legal and financial paperwork (think NDAs, vendor registration forms, MSAs, etc.) If you can get those things wrapped up while the SoW is being developed, it will definitely speed the whole process along.

Ask Questions!

As a Business Development Manager, it is my job to help you navigate the purchase process and any internal processes to keep things moving forward. It’s important to have open and honest communication and ask any questions you may have about our process and how I can help.