Project owner
We understand it can be a tall order to find the necessary mix of skills internally to successfully manage all elements of your IT project. The chances are you are likely to have some of the skill in-house. Can your project afford the consequences of making do without? This could lead to:
- The project overrunning
- Lack of understanding of yours and the software suppliers responsibilities
- Inadequately dealing with change management
- Having a solution delivered that wasn’t what you asked for
- Having a solution delivered that doesn’t do what it says on the tin!
So why use us?
We are experts at running IT projects, we work on your behalf to make sure you get a solution delivered that meets your business requirements and one that meets you technical requirements. In short, we will make sure that you ‘get what you paid for’!
We split projects into 3 distinct stages with their own specific requirements and deliverables.
- Defining your requirement
- Selecting a supplier
- Build and Implement
Defining your Requirements
This key step is about defining what your business requirements are in terms of what business problems you currently have, how they can be eliminated and how technology can automate your new way of working. Once we have done this we can create a detailed technical specification.
Why is this so important? By being able to articulate what you want in a language a supplier can understand, i.e. ‘techie speak’ you should expect them to be able to show you exactly how their technology will meet your requirements and give you a fixed cost bid. It will allow you to budget better for the project and get some early buy-in from your colleagues.
We take a 3 step approach to this stage:
- Scope the project – Putting in place a project structure and team which allows you to monitor the project effectively, and to ensure that you have all of the relevant people with the relevant skills and knowledge in the team to run the project successfully. We will help you address your current business concerns and the effect it has on the business. We will identify process improvements which will address these issues and discuss their suitability to your business needs
- Define the project – Having created your new working practices and processes we will document these in detail and identify the business benefits they will bring and the time frame for their delivery
- Technical Specification – We then translate your business requirements into a technical specification, i.e. a language any prospective supplier will be able to understand. We detail your functional, technical and user interface requirements (what information is required to be seen on screen by each user type).
The deliverable is a technical specification in sufficient detail that any supplier should have a comprehensive understanding of your requirements and be able to give you a fixed cost bid.
Supplier Selection
Selecting a supplier can be quite a challenge as there are now so many solutions and so many suppliers. Fortunately, through our sister company, IT Shortlist, we have access to over 800 of top UK suppliers and can easily identify several solutions which will meet you requirements. Best of all this service is free.
Once we have identified a definitive shortlist of suppliers "usually" around 6 but can be anything from 3-9) we will take them through a two stage selection exercise;
- Project Profile – At this stage we schedule 2 days of meetings each for 1 ½ hrs for you to meet each company and have a demonstration of the proposed system. By meeting them in this way you are able to make a very quick and effective like for like comparison and the top 3 to take through to the next stage should be quite obvious.
- Functional & Technical Specification – This is a far more detailed step where we give each supplier your detailed technical requirements and spend time with them addressing how their solution will meet your requirements at a functional and technical level.
We put together selection criteria around areas such as:
- Company background
- Financial stability
- Technologies they use (are the appropriate and the latest etc.)
- Development plans
- Commitment to long term support of the solution
- Experience
- Reference sites
- Implementation costs
- 5 year overall costs – cost of ownership
- Review the SLA’s to make sure they provide the support your business needs
We organise each of them to present how their solution will address your new working practices and will be on hand to ensure that you have a comprehensive understanding of their offering and any limitations that you should be aware of. We will ensure you have a detailed review of possible solutions and the selection of the most appropriate one against your criteria.
Build and Implementation
Software suppliers are not contractually obliged to ensure that the software is correctly used or used at all! We guide your project teams on all the elements they need to think of and do internally to be ready for the new solution and to make sure that it is used in the most efficient way. These elements include;
- Programme management – The supplier will put together a project plan and put in place a project manager. They will expect one from you as well who understands both the business and technical requirements and will be able to address questions during the build stage from their developers. The project manager will also be able to manage the specifications to make sure the supplier is building what you requested. If any risk is identified the project manager can deal with it at an early stage to remove its impact on the project.
- Data Migration - Given that processes and practices are going to be different in the new system, it is normally necessary to make some changes to data as it transfers between systems. In practice it is normally necessary to build a sophisticated process that automates the migration of the data. We are there to help plan and execute this requirement.
- Test management - The supplier will test the software to ensure that it meets the contract. If the software fails, it will be fixed under the warranty. The correct functioning of the system depends as much on the set-up (your responsibility) than the code delivered by the supplier. Therefore, it is very important that you fully test the system before you rely on it. This is an onerous task – every feature in the system needs to be tested with example data, including situations that may arise only rarely. We will assist you in creating test scripts for all process and situation eventualities, we will assist in setting up the testing environment, we will facilitate the testing of the system by the your project team, and be able to identify whether a problem found is due to the business process or a bug in the system. We will then be able to go back to the supplier and explain the problem for them to fix it.
- Training - The supplier will provide training in the use of their software. This training usually only covers the training of the mechanics of entering data. Training in the use of the software needs to be given simultaneously with a description of changes in working practices. These changes are often politically sensitive and have to be presented carefully. We will help you put together a training plan and run the training on the new solution to both key users and end users.
- Go-live - There are always problems that arise on the days before and after go-live and we will be on hand to make sure the planned implementation goes smoothly with little negative impact on the business.