Why Your Project is Not a Product: What it really means to take the leap into packaged software

Professional service organizations often struggle to differentiate themselves from the competition, which leads to a race to the bottom on price.  But we all know that price is just one piece of the value pie. Another attribute highly valued by clients is risk mitigation. The vendor with the best price to risk ratio usually gets the job.

Perceived risk increases with uncertainty. Clients will have high confidence that a certified consultant can install the out-of-the-box CRM on a clean server. Certainty is high, risk is low. But if the proposal is to build a custom CRM solution from .NET libraries, certainty evaporates and risk skyrockets. Either strategy can be successful, but the first option benefits from the certainty of encapsulated Intellectual Property (...

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