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Request Access to Workbooks
Whether you’re buying hardware or software…a simple workgroup or department solution or a solution for an entire enterprise…the Best Practice comprises eight basic steps you must go through to make the best possible choice:
- Understand your business requirements - The place to start is with your needs, in order to eliminate the risk of force-fitting a solution more suited to other situations.
- Identify your technology requirements - Translate the business needs to available technological capabilities.
- Identify various alternatives - What products are available?
- Gather information - Use various sources to “fill in the blanks” and get all the facts and stats you need to make valid comparisons.
- Develop comparisons - Focus on the features that speak to your requirements.
- Develop a shortlist - Narrow the choices and, if necessary, develop your RFI or RFP.
- Select vendors/negotiate - Use the information you gathered in step 4 and organized in step 5 as negotiating tools
- Implement - The acid test.
Identifying technical requirements is a multi-step process in itself. You start with your detailed lists of criteria, based on business needs, and finish with a checklist of features and functions that can meet these needs. When you know what feature/function questions to consider when evaluating a product, you've identified your technical requirements. You’re assured that you’ll be asking the right questions, and you’ll avoid spending needless hours considering feature/function details irrelevant to your situation.
But developing the list of criteria can be a time consuming and potentially risky if you miss key criterion. To help you determine the right questions we have developed “workbooks” to help you get the best product to meet your needs.
For a free copies of our Workbooks, please fill in the form.
After you click the “Request Workbooks” button, your name will be added to our mailing list and you will be taken to the page linking to the Workbooks.
