How to pick the right tools for your team
Finding the right tools for your team isn’t easy. You need to have a mix of strategy, rational decision making, good judgement and some intuition.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to pick the right tools for multiple teams and get buy-in. We’ll walk through how to:
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- Identify the problem.
- Measure the problem.
- Convince leadership.
- Get a team of workflow experts together from each team.
- Research and test tools.
- Present the tools.
- Pick the tool.
📂 Resources
- Weighted tooling assessment spreadsheet
- Tools Overview - Top 3 presentation — basic version that you could build off of
🚫 This guide doesn't include:
- Implementation
- Change management and adoption
- Post-implementation and continuous improvement
🎯 This guide works best for:
- Companies with 100+ employees
- 2+ teams to find tooling for
- Companies with a procurement process
When I was a data analyst in working in professional services, we had to jump between five tools just for the project intake. Some of the tools were glitchy or we didn’t have the right permissions. This is a pain point for many teams leading to frustration, bitterness, delays and mistakes.
If you don’t have a good tool stack, it’ll cause inefficient processes and scattered tools. The operational debt builds up and affects everything that’s built on top of it. Having a good tool stack gives you a solid foundation to build processes on.
Now that I’m in a position to make tooling decisions, I make it a priority to pick the best tool for the teams I’m supporting. Here’s how.
1. Identify the problem
Imagine you’re an implementation manager and you’re looped into a potential project.
- The sales team provides information to you via Google docs and notes in the CRM.
- You do presales and scoping using emails and Google forms.
- You generate a project ID in Google sheets and draft a work order with Legal.
- Once the contract is approved, you create a project plan.
By the time project intake is over, you’ve gone through six tools, three teams, and two weeks has passed — and this doesn’t even include the dreadful invoicing part.
You go through this for every project and it’s extremely frustrating. This is how you identify problems.
Frustration is a tool if you learn to use it rather then descending into anger and hopelessness.
Identify problems as an individual contributor:
- Notice how you’re feeling as you’re going through certain processes.
- Name the feeling — is it frustration? Anger? Hopelessness? Stress?
- Focus on the problem that’s causing the feeling. What exactly is causing the feeling? What would make things feel better?
Identify problems as a manager:
- What are people complaining about?
- Are there consistently mistakes?
- Are teams blaming other teams?
- Has people who usually give you feedback gone quiet? If outspoken people have gone quiet, this could mean that they’re losing hope and feeling powerless.
2. Measure the problem
When I was a solutions engineer, we didn’t have a process or the right tools for project intake, quality control, and deliverables. One project took 51 emails, 46 hours, and 4 teams to confirm the specs. Projects were consistently delayed, we made a lot of mistakes due to incomplete specifications, and had to re-do projects multiple times.
We feel these pains first-hand as the person doing the actual work, but how do we get the attention of management? This is where measuring the problem will help. Your manager will have to explain why this matters to their manager, and data can help when first-hand experience is missing. Measuring things will show managers the numbers, time to value, and the impact of the problem.
Things you can track:
- How long it takes in every step of the process.
- How many mistakes are made at every step.
- How many teams it affects.
- How many projects require rework in a month.
- Customer happiness scores and trends.
- How many tools you’re using to do a task.
- How many approvals you have to go through and how long those approvals take.
3. Convince leadership
If multiple teams are involved, you’ll need to get buy-in from multiple leaders. If you can’t get buy-in, then you may be wasting your time researching tools.
You must convince leadership that:
- The best solution is tooling and you have proof you've tried other things.
- This is a problem worth spending money and resources on.
- Stakeholders are on board.
- There’s a potential return on investment and alignment with company goals.
Presentation Framework:
- Scope of the problem including the measurements
- Risks if we don’t do this
- Before and after
- Options, including any preliminary tooling research
- Limitations of our current solution and the affected teams
- Next steps
This is an example of a flowchart I made to show leadership our future if we stayed on the current path. I wanted to show them how unmanageable the problem will get.
This is an example of how I presented the limitations of our current process. I highlighted the biggest problems in red and only talked about those.
4. Gather workflow experts
Once you get buy-in, it’s important to include stakeholders early. This gives them more skin in the game and will help later with procurement and adoption.
Who you should include:
- Workflow Experts: A representative from each team.
- Executive Sponsor: For example, a CFO or COO.
5. Research and test the tools
Now here’s the fun part. Make sure you trial tools and don’t depend on only marketing content or sales people.
- Sign up for trials: Test the actual user experience.
- Use a weighted system: Have a non-biased way to assess tooling. Template here.
- Check Security & Integrations: Eliminate tools that don't meet protocols.
⚠️ Sales Red Flags:
Sometimes they will straight up lie to you. For example, if you’re looking for specific integrations, make sure they actually have it and it’s not just "on the roadmap."
6. Present the tools
Once you have the top 3 tools, it’s time to present them and have a discussion. Recap why you're doing this, summarize research, and break down the specifications of the top 3 (features vs workarounds).
Check out the Tools Overview - Top 3 presentation template.
7. Collect feedback & pick the tool
Gather everyone’s feedback into a centralized document. When picking, how detailed you want to get is up to you. Once the vote is finished, get an official quote with a line-item breakdown. Because of all the research you've done, you'll able to fly through procurement.
Final Tip
There will be compromises no matter what you choose. You can’t make everyone happy. The weighted system will help you decide which compromises have the least impact.
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When you follow a strategy to pick the right tools, you’ll reduce operational debt for the company over time. Optimizing operations is an ongoing journey, and following this guide will set you on the right path. Give these methods a try and let me know how it goes!
And remember, the work doesn’t stop at tool selection. You’ll need to consider implementation and costs, change management and adoption, and continuous improvements.
How do you select tools at your company? I’d love to hear how others do it!