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Review policy
What a review looks like
Everything below is an example. No part of it is a real
review. The product does not exist, the firm does not exist, nobody wrote it,
and it is attached to no company and counted in no score anywhere on this site.
It is here so that someone asked to write a review can see what is being asked,
and so a visitor can see what these pages will hold once practitioners start
writing.
Real reviews are not open yet. When they are, they will come only from people
with a confirmed work address at their own firm, and every one is read by a
person before it appears.
The example
A review of Example OMS, a product
that does not exist, from Example Systems, a company that does
not exist.
2/5
Implementation
How long, how painful
4/5
Support
Response and competence
4/5
Data quality
Accuracy in practice
3/5
User experience
Where old and new part
2/5
Cost vs quote
What it really came to
3/5
Integration
Data in and out
5/5
Reliability
Behaviour on a bad day
4/5
Responsiveness
Willingness to fix
4/5
Would recommend
Would you buy again
Does the job. The implementation was twice what we were told.
Head of Operations · Hedge fund · $1bn to $10bn
We moved off a system we had run for eleven years, so some of
this is the move rather than the product. The order and allocation side has been
solid since go-live and we have had one outage in two years, which is better than
we had before.
The implementation is where I would push hard if I were buying again. We were
quoted four months and it took nine. The gap was almost entirely our own data:
nobody on either side had looked closely at how our private funds were held until
we were three months in, and the answer changed the model. I do not think they
were hiding it, but they had seen the problem before and did not ask.
Support is good once you reach the second line. The first line reads from a script
and you lose a day. Ask what proportion of tickets are closed at first line and
what happens at the handover, because that is the number that would have told us.
Costs came in about twenty per cent over the quote, all of it implementation days
rather than licence. The licence has been exactly what was signed.
Implementation 2/5
Cost vs quote 2/5
Reliability 5/5
Example Systems responded
The nine months is fair and we have changed how we scope private-fund data
since. Our discovery now includes a holdings review before a date is quoted.
On first-line support, the reviewer is right; we have moved fund-accounting
tickets straight to second line.
Why it is shaped like that
The byline is a role, a firm type and a size, and never a name
A reader needs to know whether the person writing ran the system at a firm like
theirs. They do not need to know who they are, and publishing that would stop most
people writing at all. The byline is frozen when the review is submitted, so it says
where the writer worked when they wrote it rather than where they work now.
The scores are mixed, and the useful ones usually are
Nine fives is a testimonial. The example scores implementation and cost at two
and reliability at five, because that is what a real account of a real system tends
to look like: the thing works, and getting to the point where it worked cost more
than anyone said it would.
The detail is the point
“Support is slow” helps nobody. “First line reads from a script
and you lose a day; ask what proportion of tickets close at first line” is a
question the next buyer can put to the vendor. A review that hands the reader a
question is worth ten that hand them an adjective.
The company gets to answer
Every review can carry a reply from the company, shown underneath it and labelled.
The reply cannot change the score and cannot remove the review. See the
right of reply.
Ready to write a real one? Register your firm. You will
need a work address at your own company, and you will be asked for your role, your
firm type and its size, which become the byline.