Understanding Evolving Business Needs and the Projects that result from them – Part 2 of 4

May 8th, 2012

Are you reviewing the sources of your IT projects before you plan how to source them?

Today’s post is by Mark Davis; Sr. Vice President of Operations and CTO at SafeSourcing

Over the next 3 days, we will be looking at some of the reasons new projects get introduced to a company and the steps you can take to begin gathering data and other information the business requires to make the correct sourcing decisions.

A Vendor Introduced Perceived Need –  Because the  Information Technology Industry changes so fast there are many  cases when a vendor will get an audience with a company for a product the company never even knew existed to fix an issue or a  vendor perceived problem that the customer in some cases  doesn’t even know they have.  Good vendors will leave that meeting having convinced the customer that they do have a need. Almost always, this means there is also no budget planned for this need, let alone the fact that you are already resource constrained. 

As such these situations can become a two goal project. The first goal being to try and understand the market as well as other companies that can also offer the specific product tor service. The additional requirement is to at the same time build a business case that can be presented to leadership in order to stage potential funding in order to pay for non budgeted offerings.  A nice way to get started is to begin with a strong RFI; these can be fashioned in such a way that the vendors can help you to create your business case.  Collecting information relative to the vendor, product, service, an ROI and the vendor’s rationale for choosing them will provide you with everything required to take your case to the next level for approval.

For more information about how you can begin to take a look at your companies new projects, please contact a SafeSourcing Customer Service Representative.  

We look forward to your comments.

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