buy it right - optimize it procurement
TRANSCRIPT
Buy IT Right – Optimizing your IT ProcurementSelecting the right IT solution is a delicate balance between vendor, product, price, and service.
Your Challenge:Buying IT products and services can be a challenging task for IT leaders and is often done poorly. You have to discover and prioritize end user and management stakeholder requirements, evaluate vendors objectively, and make a decision based on limited information.
To be successful with your IT procurement, you need to have a proven procurement process, optimize it for each procurement, and execute it excellently. Your sub insights are all the other impactful insights not associated with individual project steps. Lots of data in this section.
Doing IT procurement right can add value; doing it wrong can destroy value.
Requirements gathering is the key to defining everything about what is being purchased, yet it is an area where people often make critical mistakes.
Plan to be scrutinized and challenged on your decisions. Formally documenting your procurement selection process will help you successfully pass an audit.
Your vendor may be doing the work, but you are responsible for the results. You can outsource responsibility, but not accountability.
Look before you leap: Many organizations jump into buying IT before they’ve thought through the whole process and end up having to backtrack or make last minute changes. Spend time up-front to make sure that your key preparations are complete before diving into procurement.Use the right vehicle for the context of your specific procurement; decide if your objective is to solicit more information, request detailed proposals, request quotes, or simply award a contract.Procurement is as much about managing people as it is about managing a process. Get the right people involved early to help with the procurement.Identify and track activities to keep procurement on track.Get your vendors interested and involved early on.Don’t rebuild your procurement process for each new procurement; configure each step of the process to match the specifics of the particular procurement.Requirements should be complete, concise, brief, and just detailed enough for a vendor to understand exactly what it is you are looking to purchase.It’s nearly impossible for a procurement to meet all your requirements; decide which ones you absolutely need and which ones you can live without.Crafting a quality RFx package is critical for receiving qualified proposals in return. The evaluation process needs to be based on objective criteria and pre-determined weightings, that are defined as part of the RFx.Being objective during evaluation is critical. Stick to the evaluation criteria and framework when scoring proposals in order to ensure a fair, auditable result. Once the numbers are in, don’t forget to check your gut. It needs to feel right too.
