Understanding how to choose the best application packaging service to assist with your organisation’s business as usual (BAU) or project-based packaging activities is not a trivial process.
Application packaging is a niche skill set, and as such many organisations don’t have internal resources capable of performing such tasks. And even if they did, in many cases they don’t have the capacity to implement large-scale migration projects.
This is when they seek the services of application packaging contractors or an external application packaging service provider like Alkane Solutions.
The Problem
When organisations don’t have application packaging knowledge internally, it’s impossible for them to deduce a good application packaging provider from a bad application packaging provider simply because they don’t understand the technicalities involved.
I’ve seen it time and time again – non-technical people recruiting for technical roles that they know little or nothing about; it’s a recipe for disaster. And using recruitment agents to supply technical resources is no different – all they do is data mine keywords from CVs (which individuals often lie about having knowledge of) and send them over in bulk format for the organisation to rationalise.
This engagement process takes a long time to separate the wheat from the chaff, often resulting in considerably more chaff than wheat. And organisations will only discover that they have hired chaff after a few months’ time and several thousands of pounds later.
But it’s not only non-technical people that can be easily duped.
Don’t Judge a Book by its Cover
Many years ago, I was an employee of a large global IT services provider. We’d won a contract for a large project and required more application packaging contractors to assist us.
I interviewed over 25 people and declined them all due to not understanding the basic technicalities of our industry. This resulted in countless wasted hours reviewing keyword-stuffed CVs and further wasted hours conducting monotonous interviews.
Sadly, the market was (and still is) awash with charlatans who don’t understand packaging best practises; who cobble together poorly written scripts, and who don’t understand the basic principles of application packaging.
Instead of recruiting application packaging contractors, we decided to engage an external application packaging service provider instead, to rid ourselves of the painful and laborious recruitment process.
We invited multiple application packaging service providers to pitch for the work. One presentation stood out; four people turned up, spoke eloquently, were all suited and booted and armed with snazzy PowerPoint presentations. Our management team were salivating before they’d even heard the pitch!
In honesty I thought sending 4 people to pitch for an application packaging contract was overkill. But ultimately, they delivered a polished presentation and they sold us the dream very well. They demonstrated previous experience and gave a good general overview of the process. The numbers stacked up and we agreed terms.
Three months later we realised that we’d made a mistake. A big mistake.
The quality of application packages being delivered was inferior. They were full of junk registry and files, not optimised correctly, no conflict resolution, didn’t conform to our application packaging standards, and the documentation was full of spelling mistakes. And these applications were potentially going out to dozens….if not hundreds, or end users!
We could see the authors of each application package by consulting the associated documentation. And to my horror, I realised that the people packaging our applications though the newly engaged application packaging service were the names of candidates that I had rejected from our internal interview process!
How To Choose the Best Application Packaging Service
Understanding how to choose the best Application Packaging Service is a challenging process whether you are technical or not.
In the past I’ve seen network administrators profess to be able to package applications, large software houses, and even generic IT bods. But the fact is, they can’t. They are what I refer to as the ‘next, next, next’ people who can only package basic applications and would balk at the thought of troubleshooting and debugging a troublesome application.
Application packaging is a skilled discipline, and if you’re an IT manager looking to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each device then you need to take application packaging seriously. Far too frequently I hear service desks utter those dreaded words “rebuild it” when it shouldn’t be necessary if things were done properly.
Don’t just trust a silky sales pitch when choosing an application packaging service. You will likely end up with a bunch of inexperienced rookies packaging your applications who have been recruited on the the fly, with their experienced service delivery manager portraying a more impressive facade.
Applications are one of the most important aspects of the modern business. Without them, most businesses wont function. Don’t neglect them. Do your due diligence when choosing an application packaging service provider. Understand who will be packaging your applications and find out what experience they have.
At Alkane Solutions all members of our packaging team have a minimum of 5 years’ experience. And any packages that get delivered to our clients go through a stringent quality assurance process by our senior packagers, who have a minimum of 10 years packaging experience.
If you need an informal chat about your application packaging activities, no matter how big or small the project is, please contact us for a friendly chat.
