A lighter-touch OSS procurement approach (part 3)

We’ve spoken at length about TM Forum’s, “Time to kill the RFP? Reinventing IT procurement for the 2020s,” report so far this week. We’ve also spoken about the feeling that the OSS/BSS RFP (Request For Proposal) still has relevance in some situations… as long as it’s more of a lighter-touch than most. We’ve spoken about a more pragmatic approach that aims to find best available fit (for key objectives through stages of filtering) rather than perfect fit (for all requirements through detailed analyses). And I should note that “best available fit” includes measurement against these three contrarian procurement KPIs ahead of the traditional ones.

Yesterday’s post discussed how we get to a short list with minimal involvement of buyers and sellers, with the promise that we’d discuss the detailed analysis stage today.

It’s where we do use an RFP, but with thought given to the many pain-points cited so brilliantly by Mark Newman and team in the abovementioned TM Forum report.

The RFP provides the mechanism to firm up pricing and architecture, but is also closely tied to a PoC (Proof of Concept) demonstration. The RFP helps to prioritise the order in which PoCs are performed. PoCs tend to be very time consuming for buyer and seller. So if there’s a clear leader from the paper studies so far, then they will demonstrate first.

If there’s not a clear difference, or if the prime candidate’s demonstration identified significant gaps, then additional PoCs are run.

And to ensure the PoCs are run against the objectives that matter most, we use scenarios that were prioritised during part 1 of this series.

Next steps are to form the more detailed designs, commercials / contracts and ratify that the business case still holds up.

In yesterday’s post, I also promised to share our “starting-point” procurement methodology. I say starting point because each buyer situation is different and we tend to customise it to each buyer’s needs. It’s useful for starting discussions.

The overall methodology diagram is shown below:

PAOSS vendor selection process

A few key notes here:

  1. The process looks much heavier than it really is… if you use traditional procurement processes as an indicator
  2. We have existing templates for all the activities marked in yellow
  3. The activity marked in blue partially represents the project we’re getting really excited to introduce to you tomorrow

 

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