Vendor selection
Both vendors will demo well. Both will show you a walkthrough built on their own sandbox by someone who builds them daily. Neither demo tells you what maintaining the platform will feel like in month fourteen, which is the thing that actually determines whether this succeeds.
We take no margin on either licence.
We hold practitioner certifications on both platforms and a reseller agreement with neither. There is no quota behind the recommendation and no commission attached to the outcome. That is the entire reason this exercise is worth buying from us rather than getting it free from a partner who sells one of them.
Six questions that decide it.
01 — How many systems, and will that number grow?
The single strongest predictor. One stable application and several expanding ones lead to different answers.
02 — Who owns this in eighteen months?
A named person with allocated time, or “the team”. This determines how much platform complexity you can carry, and it is the question most selection processes skip entirely.
03 — Is the requirement guidance or automation?
Show me where to click and do this for me are different products.
04 — How stable are the interfaces?
Aggressively re-rendering applications raise the cost of targeting and make release management non-optional.
05 — What data is available to segment on?
Guidance that can’t tell a new joiner from a power user isn’t guidance, it’s noise. What attributes the host system can expose constrains everything downstream.
06 — What has to be true for this to be judged a success?
If nobody can answer this, the selection is premature and the deployment will be measured on whatever is convenient later.
The deliverable.
A written recommendation with the reasoning set out, including the strongest argument against the platform we recommend — because you will hear that argument eventually, and it is better to hear it from us first.
Alongside it: the governance model the deployment will need regardless of which platform you choose, and an honest estimate of the internal effort required. That last figure is the one vendors leave out, and it is usually the one that decides whether the programme works.
Do you recommend WalkMe or Whatfix more often?
It depends entirely on estate size and ownership model. Expanding multi-system estates with a dedicated owner point toward WalkMe; single-system deployments maintained part-time point toward Whatfix. We publish an even-handed comparison rather than a house preference.
Can you help if we’ve already chosen?
Yes, and most of our work starts there. Selection is the smaller engagement; implementation and governance are where deployments succeed or fail, and we do both on either platform.
What if the answer is that we don’t need a DAP?
We’ll say so. On systems used occasionally by small teams, documentation and better onboarding are frequently the cheaper answer. We would rather lose the licence-adjacent work than implement a platform that won’t be used.