When your business purchases anything, there is always an inherent risk. However, when your business is looking to purchase technology products and services, it impacts most areas of your business, and is something you don’t do on a regular basis. Your risk increases significantly.
Technological Impact On Your Business
When your business is evaluating potential technology investments, the stakes are high. The right technological solution can streamline your business operations, enhancing productivity and driving growth. Conversely, the wrong choice can lead to wasted resources, inefficiencies and missed opportunities. Tango IT understands these challenges and has developed an approach to de-risking technology selection for businesses.
By leveraging our wide ranging, extensive expertise and comprehensive processes, Tango IT helps businesses make informed decisions, ensuring technological investments align with strategic goals and deliver maximum value.
What You Need To Know For Accurate Evaluation
When evaluating different technology products and services, you need to have an in-depth understanding on a range of business factors in order to compare solutions effectively. Some of these areas include:
- What do you want (in detail)?
- What are your competitors doing with their technology?
- What are the latest trends for this technology?
- What are the business processes the technology will support / impact?
- What dependencies will there be on other technologies / data?
- What data will be managed through the system and it’s integrations?
- What level of security is required?
- What is your technology architecture it needs to fit into?
- What are you evaluating on?
- Supplier reputation
- Product features
- The interfaces
- The support
- How much is being built just for you?
- Price or value
- What suppliers are in this space?
- What considerations are there on which suppliers to include?
- Country of build for legals, support & data transit
- Storage & backups
- Capacity
- Their fit with your market or style of organisation
- How do you encourage the right suppliers to respond and respond efficiently?
- How do you break down all the requirements and compare responses fairly and without agendas?
- How do you shortlist options and see the most important features demonstrated before you choose?
- Once you have a preferred supplier, how do you validate the statement of works is the same as promised in the evaluation?
- How do you negotiate the terms and conditions to protect your organisation, including liabilities from system or process failure?
Simple Transparent Evaluation Platform (STEP)
Tango IT have created an approach to define, procure and deliver technology from years of experience in scoping, evaluating and implementing technology solutions from a completely independent position. This enables businesses to make informed decisions from a position of knowledge and strength.
Our model is underpinned by our requirements capture process linked to the market evaluation methods, which we have now web-enabled in our Simple Transparent Evaluation Platform (STEP).
Overview of STEP
STEP supports our processes as outlined below, but our approach can also be followed manually:
Master Library Management
STEP includes a Master Library for all RFx Information, Questions and Requirements (IQRs), allowing you to learn from what others have asked. Includes:
- Request details – Background | Current Environment | Outcomes & Objectives | RFx Process
- Compliance criteria – Conditions of Responding | Insurances
- Qualitative Evaluations – Demonstrated Capacity | Implementation Capacity | Contractuals & Risk
- Functional Requirements
- Non-Functional Requirements – Business Continuity | Integration | Performance | Security
- Services – Data Migration | Professional Services | Training | Support | Licensing
Building A Customer-Tailored Request For Quote / Proposal / Tender (RFx)
Procurement processes can vary considerably from a short Request for Quote for well known and simple products and services, to extensive Tenders taking months to complete all the stages.
The questions in the RFx are given MoSCoW (Must, Should, Could, Won’t) prioritisation where we select requirements from the library, amend existing descriptions to suit specific customer wording or tailor from scratch.
Supplier Selection
Tango allocates suppliers who can respond to the RFx and manages the process of their inclusion, including supplier questions and answers. Suppliers are given a login to be able to view and respond to the RFx.
Supplier Response
Suppliers can read and respond with detailed comments, as well as uploading attachments. Suppliers can also apply clarity at an individual level including whether each feature or service is:
- Pricing Inclusive | Estimated | Not Priced
- Feature Is Standard | Chargeable | Bespoke | Third Party
Scoring
Scoring for Tango and the customer to be able to review the responses and score them.
- Did Not Respond
- No Score (Did not meet requirements)
- Partially Meets Requirements (with Optional Grades for Confidence levels)
- Meets Requirements (with Optional Grades for Confidence levels)
- Exceeds Requirements
- Provide Comments on the reasoning behind the scoring
Value
For most of our evaluations we don’t look at the price until after the rest of the response has been scored. It tends to introduce a bias to the scorer. Of course, you do have to then evaluate the costs but you shouldn’t just look at the headline rate. Try to build a model to compare all the responses in a consistent way. This can include:
- Setup / implementation / integration / migration costs (typically one off)
- License numbers based on your current and projected needs over multiple years
- Recurring costs over multiple years including CPI and usage level changes
- Exit costs of your current technology and when the new one is shut down
- Ongoing costs of your legacy
- Hidden costs of your own staff / project management / change management
- Hard cost changes because staff roles will be different with the new technology
- Soft costs changes (do you want to count them?)
- Benefits / Return on investment
How many years do you look at to understand the total cost against the returns? It could be the product only lasts 3-4 years in your organisation, but some could be planned to be in use for 15 years.
Reporting
The final summary of all responses with weightings applied to determine the profile of responses. Allows for comparison of:
- How all suppliers responded to each question
- Supplier’s aggregated scores for each section with relevant weightings applied for overall comparison
- Overall ranking of suppliers to support shortlisting and selection
The Tango IT Difference
Tango IT’s independent, unbiased and technology agnostic approach ensures your technology investments are based on thorough, transparent evaluations. By leveraging our expertise and our proprietary STEP platform, you can minimise technology risk and make confident, informed decisions.
Are you ready to remove the risk from your technology decisions? Contact the team at Tango IT to discuss your specific requirements and discover how our expert, independent advice can guide you to the most suitable solutions for your business.