Providing you with the advice and support you need now. Leaving you with the methodologies, tools and know-how to guide you in the future.

Initiating the Project

Starting right is the most important step in buying right. Before any significant amount of work can be done on selecting software, it is essential to know exactly what the scope of the project will be and who will be involved in the process. It is imperative to clearly communicate your intentions to senior decision makers so there is up-front understanding and support for the software evaluation and selection project

Key activities include:

• Choose a Project Team: Getting the right people involved from the beginning is a key to success. We will help you identify who will manage and sponsor the project, who will provide input, and who will assist in executing the steps of the process.
• Define the Project: A Project Charter is the most concise way to outline the team members, roles, responsibilities, scope, assumptions, and risks of the project. Also, a high-level project plan is created that includes major tasks that need to be performed.
• Plan a Project Kick-Off Meeting: We will guide you through the preparation and execution steps of this meeting that explains, at a high level, what will be happening over the lifecycle of the project, as well as when and how the project team and stakeholders will be involved in the process.

Determine the Business Benefit

Getting buy-in from stakeholders at the beginning of the selection process is critical. If this support is not built upon sound financial and strategic measures, the consensus that you will rely on to complete the project will likely evaporate when you need it the most.

This analysis is based upon the business processes that will be affected by the software under consideration. Later in the project these will be the same processes for which you will gather requirements, so it is essential to understand their current state and the anticipated improvements.

Key activities include:

• Identify Processes Affected: The first step is to identify all processes that will be affected by your software acquisition. Once these have been identified, the financial impact of these changes can be analyzed.
• Determine the Potential for Financial Impact: We will help the project sponsor and stakeholders determine which processes will have the greatest potential for making a financial impact on the organization.
• Create and Distribute Business Impact Report: We created a formal document that describes which processes will have the greatest financial impact for the organization, and distribute it to the necessary stakeholders for discussion, input, and approval.
• Write a Business Case: To ensure that the project has the go-ahead from senior management, we prepare a business case outlining why the software solution is needed, what will be accomplished by the implementation of the software, and how the software will benefit the organization, either through intangibles like improved quality and speed, or through a real return on investment (ROI).

Define the Detailed Requirements

Gathering and writing business and system requirements can be an overwhelming task. Some may argue that the amount of time spent on these tasks would be better spent looking for solutions, but until you know what you need, how can you effectively look for it? Poorly defined business requirements are the leading cause of project failure.

Key activities include:

• Interview Stakeholders: Senior executives, department management, and end-users of the software are included to capture multiple perspectives, and complete the set of requirements.
• Create First Draft of Business Requirements: After determining which stakeholder-defined requirements are true requirements and which ones are extraneous, they are assembled into logical groups.
• Map System Requirements: The business requirements are used to map the actual system requirements of the software.
• Acquire or Build Feature List: A list of common or available attributes and features for a product-type is a useful tool for requirements gatherers. These lists provide you with a comprehensive inventory of possible features to consider when writing a requirements document.
• Sanity Check Requirements with Stakeholders: It is necessary to invest several hours with various stakeholder groups reviewing and refining the requirements to understand the nature and priority of requirements. Several revisions to the original documents can be expected.
• Create Second Draft of Requirements: This iterative process is followed until the requirements have been signed off by all necessary stakeholders.
• Final Review: Prioritize Requirements: Pair-Ranking, Preference Ranking, and Importance Ranking are utilized to prioritize the system requirements. This list will be used to identify appropriate commercial software.
• Requirements Sanity and Sufficiency Check: At this critical point, the project manager and the INVANTAS Solutions LLC consultant must decide whether to continue reworking the requirements. The essential question is, "Do you have enough information in the requirements to begin researching alternative solutions?"

Survey the Marketplace

Once the business and system requirements have been documented and ranked, it is time to begin researching available software solutions that meet your needs. This component of your project results in the identification of potential solutions, from which a short list of the most viable alternatives is generated.

Key activities include:

• Determine High Level Criteria for Alternatives: The "go/no go" criteria for including commercial software on your long list should be determined before alternatives are analyzed to avoid any prejudice.
• Search for Alternatives: A scan for commercial software that might suit the needs of the organization is conducted. The high-level criteria established in Step 1 above will allow you to filter out unsuitable products.
• Document Your Search: In order to validate your search process, and to provide a quick overview of your software elimination decisions, the search will be documented with the tools from the methodology.
• Define Potential Solutions: During the search, we may discover that a standalone application will not meet all of your requirements. During this step, we will define what bundles of applications are available that will meet your needs.
• Create Shortlist of Solutions: Typically, the three or four software solutions that most closely fit the needs of your organization are identified.
• Consider the Build Option: It may be that there is no software solution that will meet the needs of your organization. Together, we will price out how much the software will cost to build and how well it will suit the needs of the enterprise. A comparison is then conducted to see how the build option compares against commercial solutions.
• Analyze Alternatives: Each of the alternative solutions is rated against your requirements by utilizing a scoring system developed specifically for your organization.

Prepare the RFP

Your RFP is the amalgamation of all of the preceding effort into a single document. In addition to the effort required to pull this information together, it must include necessary steps, requests, and information to ensure a proper evaluation of solutions and vendors.

The RFP process is typically used by medium and large-sized organizations or when the software being acquired is significant enough to warrant this step.

Key activities include:

• Determine Evaluation Criteria: In order to make a reasoned selection, the most important (i.e. “must do”) requirements must be articulated and the criteria must be prioritized and weighted to allow the suitability of the solutions to be ranked. The viability and capabilities of the vendors must also be evaluated.
• Define the Selection Process: Vendors will need to know your timeline and how you will make your decision in order to best match their capabilities to your needs.
• Assemble the RFP Package: In addition to the requirements to be satisfied by the solution, it is necessary to include information about your organization so that vendors can place their solution into your context. The complexity and resources required for these activities should not be underestimated.

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