If you’ve never selected and installed a software package before, and are now charged with this task, this book is a must-read. If you haven’t been involved in software packages for a long time, this book is a necessary refresher course. And, even if you’re a veteran of the software package process, this book is an excellent checklist, and may remind you of things you’ve missed. This book is valuable to information technology (IT) professionals, but business users of packaged software will also find a lot here that will inform their roles, as well as create reasonable expectations for what the IT team should be doing throughout the process.

For novices, I recommend that you go through the book sequentially, as though it were a novel, just to get an overview of the entire process. Then, as you go through each step in your own project, you can use the book as a reference. The book has an especially comprehensive table of contents that serves as a guide. The index is equally complete, but I found the topical organization of the table of contents more useful when looking for specific subjects.

The author provides dozens of exhibits and templates that are both good examples of basic points and a super starting point from which you can build your own tools. For example, the book provides a spreadsheet for scoring requests for proposal (page 68). Return on investment (ROI) calculations are illustrated on pages 170 to 171. A sample communication plan, vital for change management, is shown on page 188. There are several tables on pages 212 to 214 explaining how you might track issues that show up in the testing process.

One of the things that I especially liked about the book was its focus on the real world. Tayntor spends a significant number of chapters on the people issues in the project, for example, the steering team, communications and change management, and training, all vital to the success of any IT effort. In addition, Tayntor talks about how to plan interfaces with already installed systems, and develop processes for conversion from old systems, both topics often ignored in a packaged software implementation until far too late.

Tayntor includes useful appendices: a list of acronyms (which should be required in every technical book), a sample project charter (too often ignored in all IT projects, much less package installations), and a suggested reading list (not as strong as the basic text itself; it contains only 12 items, four of which are other books she has written).

As impressed as I am with this book, however, I found it to have a “pre-Internet” feel to it. Topics such as Web-based software and service-oriented architectures are not mentioned at all, yet these are the ways many people now acquire pre-written applications. Globalization and distributed teams, common these days in all medium and large-sized companies, are barely discussed. Even the application service provider model, widely used by companies that don’t care to deal with the IT infrastructure involved in applications, gets only brief mention, on page 138, in spite of the fact that this variation on software packages has significant pitfalls to consider, such as assuring that the vendor provides adequate security, data archiving, and disaster recovery capability. There is also little mention of metrics, namely of tools and methods that should be used to test the reliability and robustness of the package, and then the success of the package in the user environment. These flaws notwithstanding, this is a good reference book for anyone involved in implementing software written by others; these days, that probably includes us all.