The story…

As the full-time VP of IT and Business Systems, our company was facing a big cashflow crisis and our founder deputized every person on staff to identify areas for spend reductions. The Controller and I were appointed to lead the process of sizing, ranking, and executing on the suggestions with the best value. Over 100 people submitted almost 200 ideas and we began a tenacious campaign to capture savings and reduce commitments through any means available. The majority of the potential was wrapped into software subscriptions.

Acting as a portfolio and budget owner, engaged with the publishers and partners to gauge which were aligned with our success and which prioritized short-term interests. The subscription software model selects for publisher partners who correlate their customers’ definitions of success to align with their own. These partners saw the potential value our continued partnership could provide and worked with us to make compromises to keep us as a viable customer through trying times.

This also provided an opportunity to rationalize the components in the landscape and concentrate more value in fewer platforms with better adoption per application. With clear direction through the C-Suite, the staff was never more eager to consolidate seven project management applications into two, or three email automation tools into one. Our savings stream grew week after week for several months.

The clear, united executive direction coupled with the methods we designed to provide collaborative transparency from ask through, awareness, acknowledgement, analysis, alignment, agreement, action, and award were a revelation for informing our approaches for complex subscription software portfolio management ongoing. People were happier using fewer, better tools and the partners who provide them are invested in our company’s success, literally.