RE: Worries about tools (a bit long)

[Janet_Swisher -at- trilogy -dot- com]

"Habegger, Nolan" wrote:
>The key to overcoming this is to demonstrate definitive and sound 
business
>reasons for the migration. Telling management that Frame is a superior
>product will not work unless you can demonstrate the superiority in the
>context of the company's performance. <snip>
>Show how a migration will increase productivity,
>automate processes, reduce necessary server space or decrease paper 
usage.
>Give accurate time and money savings, and don't forget that time saves
>almost ALWAYS translates into money saved.

Up until about a year ago, this was a Word shop.  Then the day before a 
particular (graphics-heavy) document was to ship, Word corrupted the 
files, and resisted all attempts to solve the problem (the backups turned 
out to be corrupted too).  One writer managed to salvage the files using 
her personal copy of FrameMaker, make the deadline and save the day. After 
that, it wasn't hard to make the case for migrating to FrameMaker, and 
within two months we were on our way.  Basically, the "case" for 
FrameMaker consisted of "here's all the problems we have with Word, and 
the things we can't do with it," and "here's why FrameMaker doesn't have 
those problems, and the things we could do with it that we can't do now" 
(quantified in money/time terms).  Of course, it helped that we had a 
writer on board who was already a FrameMaker expert, and could do things 
like setting up the templates and tutoring the rest of the team. 

Cheers,
Janet