Rod Fisher

Business requirements – typically initiated through connections with key business users. Often the important business processes are documented and validated by key business users. Strong experience with determining and documenting a number of the more common business processes and in turning these processes into business requirements.

Preparation of RFP documentation – in order to provide prospective vendors with a project scope to respond to, RFP documentation is prepared and made available for distribution to software vendors. Typically this document would include any general business requirements that the software needs to address as well as more specific business process requirements. The level of detail of this document is directly related to the complexity of the requirements, the breadth of functionality the software needs to cover and the overall complexity of the business itself.

Preparation of selection criteria – so as to ensure that the competing software packages are at least measured on a “Like for like” basis initially, best practice is to develop a number of selection criteria that have been assessed as both relevant to the business and directly related to the business processes and requirements. Over a number of projects I have been involved in creating appropriate selection criteria.

Assessment of RFP – at the point where all RFP documents have been submitted for assessment, I have been involved in scoring and assessing the various proposals against the pre-defined selection criteria.The outcome of this activity is to select a short list of vendors who will be asked to present their proposed solutions in more detail.

Workshop presentations  – once the selection criteria have been developed and short list vendors advised – workshop presentations of the proposed software applications are undertaken. Typically the vendors are required to demonstrate how their product would address the nominated business processes as well as provide an opportunity to view the features and capabilities of the application.

Software vendor negotiations and contract review – upon selection of the preferred vendor, typically Last and Best Offer negotiations commence and the deliverables from the vendor are firmed up and subsequently incorporated into a contract to be agreed and signed by both parties. I have been involved in this process a number of times and are quite familiar with the various techniques and discussions that are used by both parties in order to reach a more beneficial outcome for their organisations.