If you’re like me, when you want something done by others, you want it to be completed quickly.

Compensation plan programming is one of those projects that takes longer than we’d like, usually much longer.

If you’ve wondered why this article is for you.

The Process

Compensation plan programming is really just one of the steps in compensation plan development.  Here are all of the steps:

1. Your company or your MLM compensation plan expert creates a design document that communicates your requirements to your software company or internal IT team.
2. Your MLM software company or internal IT team reviews your document and asks questions.
3. You or your compensation plan expert provides the answers.
4. Your MLM software company or IT team creates a document that explains the project in their own words, in their format.  They ask you to review it and to tell them what needs to be changed so that their document is both accurate and complete.
5. You or your compensation plan expert reviews this document, sending changes back to the software company or developers, and reviewing new versions until their document is both accurate and complete.  These steps are usually performed multiple times.
6. You approve their document when your team has no more changes to their document.
7. Using their document as the sole source of instructions, an MLM software programmer configures and programs your compensation plan, and performs the first round of testing himself or herself.
8. A software tester (a different person) tests the plan, finds problems, and submits these problems to the programmer to be fixed.  The programmer fixes the problems and sends the software back to the tester for corrections.  These steps are usually performed multiple times.
9. When the software tester has no more corrections, the software company or internal IT team tells you that the plan is now ready for YOUR testing.
10. You or your compensation plan expert tests the plan finds problems and reports them back to the software company or internal IT team for corrections.  The software developer makes the corrections, the software tester retests the plan, and you are informed when the plan is ready for your team’s testing to resume.  These steps are usually performed multiple times.
11. Your team stops testing the software when your tests reveal no more problems.

The Schedule

Whenever a project requires a team of people, each of whom performs a specific task, the project is subject to the effects of scheduling multiple people’s time.  Everyone on the project has other tasks to perform that are related to other projects.

Below is an example of a schedule for all of the key tasks described above.  The time required for each task may be different for your company.

Conclusion

When you view compensation plan development as a project, you’ll understand more about why it takes so long.  To have a successful project, don’t do these things.