A rights management vendor must implement their solution thoughtfully and thoroughly to help you compete in today's market. They must understand the nuances of the rights management industry, design robust products built to handle ever-changing complexity, create and orchestrate workable solutions, and follow a tested roadmap to ensure a successful implementation and sustained value.
Here’s a good checklist for you to begin to evaluate vendor platforms, based on FilmTrack's carefully crafted methodology for implementing a rights management system.
1. Allow Time for Pre-Sale Discovery
A considerable amount of time should be dedicated to the pre-sales discovery phase to guarantee the platform ultimately selected meets the unique requirements for each customer. This addresses a fundamental fact: media companies vary significantly in how they approach rights management, what their libraries consist of, and who and how they service their customers.
Pre-sales discovery should follow these steps:
The vendor should establish trust and allow a new client to gauge other client feedback about the implementation process, answering questions such as:
What efforts were taken to get to know your specific business needs?
Were there a lot of surprises?
Were costs much higher than anticipated?
Were risk issues raised early on?
Pre-sales engineering should carry out client discovery sessions to aid in their design of the application for a new client's specific business needs.
The vendor should take time to understand the nuances of the client’s business to limit surprises as the project is underway.
As implementation is underway, anything outside of the initial scope should be clearly documented to facilitate discussions with the client and their executive team on whether additional requirements should be included before the platform goes live or if a phase two implementation plan is necessary.
2. Implementation Using a Proven Methodology
Based on the discovery sessions, the vendor and new client can move forward with the product’s configuration, setup, and user training to ensure everything is ready to go live. The vendor's implementation should include a plan with specific steps, including:
Rely on a set of tools (SOP documentation, checklists, and other tools) created as a result of a thorough understanding of software implementation processes. This expedites the implementation from design through to delivery. These tools should continually be refined and improved based on experience from every client implementation experience.
Avoid handing off parts of the process to third parties – instead, do the implementation in-house to provide a cohesive approach and avoid data loss or knowledge transfer issues.
Approach implementation in a way that ensures adoption – end users must believe in the solution and align with the objectives in order to embrace, learn, and use it going forward.
Vendors should provide end users with ample patience, empathy, leadership, and support. If you invest in the relationship, the adoption will be successful.
3. Data Migration Unique to the Rights Management Industry
Data migration is a significant aspect of implementation, particularly when shifting from legacy systems. Vendors should:
Make the data migration unique to each customer. Media companies, big and small, all have their own ways of dealing, selling, and buying with their customers, which is reflected in how they manage their data.
The rights management software should be configured to handle contracts with enormous complexities – client libraries will feature titles with exclusivities or avails varying from country to country, region to region, language to language, and more.
4. Delivery Via Business Process Transformation
Some rights management vendors lack a formal practice around delivery, or they simply stand up their products in a consistent way, every time. The preferred method to ensure software adoption is to make product delivery a business process transformation engagement. This is achieved by:
Having a change management process to help new end users understand how the software will live in their environment and how they can best utilize it to transform their business processes to make them run more effectively.
Providing robust training that ensures users are shown how to utilize the solution as part of their overall go-to system, from day-to-day tasks to less infrequent tasks like quarterly reporting.
5. Provide Support From Day One
After a rights management platform has gone live, users require support and a definitive handoff to a support team that manages:
Ongoing customer support to help assure customer success.
Continued training, not just a help desk, to assist users when they get stuck and with their development on using more complex features.
The evolution of vendor-customer long-term relationships – even after implementation, there will be a need to solve problems that occur because people join the organization, and business needs change.
Getting Started
Taking a “set it and forget it” approach to software implementation just doesn't cut it — it wastes money and time and often results in poor adoption. To successfully deploy rights management technology and get the maximum ROI, check out our new guide, Implementing Royalties and Rights Management Software, which highlights how a holistic approach that involves understanding unique client systems and vendor processes leads to project success.
FilmTrack is an RBC Company and subsidiary of City National Bank Member FDIC. City National Bank is a subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada.
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