A lighter-touch OSS procurement approach (part 1)

You may have noticed that we’ve run a series of posts about OSS/BSS procurement, and about the RFP process by association.

One of the first steps in the traditional procurement process is preparing a strategy and detailed set of requirements.

As TM Forum’s, “Time to kill the RFP? Reinventing IT procurement for the 2020s,” report describes:
Before an RFP can be issued, the CSP’s IT or network team must produce a document detailing the strategy for implementing a technology or delivering a service, which is a lengthy process because of the number of stakeholders involved and the need to describe requirements in a way that satisfies them all.”

The problem with most requirements documents, the ones I’ve seen at least, is that they tend to get down into a deep, deep level of detail. And when it’s down in that level of detail, contrasting opinions from different stakeholders can make it really difficult to reach agreement. Have you ever been in a room with many high-value (and high cost) stakeholders spending days debating the semantics (and wording) of requirements? Every stakeholder group needs a say and needs to be heard.

The theory is that you need a great level of detail to evaluate supplier offerings for best-fit. Well, maybe, but not in the initial stages.

First things first – I seek to find out what’s really important for the organisation. That rarely comes from a detailed requirements spreadsheet, but by determining the things that are done most often and/or add the most value to the buyer’s organisation. I use persona mapping, long-tail and perhaps whale-curve mapping approaches to determine this.

Persona mapping means identifying all the groups within the buyer’s organisation that need to interact with the OSS/BSS (current and proposed). Then sitting with each group to determine what they need to achieve, who they need to interact with and what their workflows look like. That also gives a chance for all groups to be heard.

From this, we can collaboratively determine some high-level evaluation criteria, maybe only 15-20 to start with. You’d be surprised at how quickly this 15-20 criteria can help with initial supplier filtering.

Armed with the initial 15-20 evaluation criteria and the project we’re getting excited to launch on Monday, we can get to a relevant list of possible suppliers quite quickly. It allows us to do a broad market search to compile a list of suppliers, not just from the 5-10 suppliers the buyer already knows about, but from the 400+ suppliers/products available on the market. And we don’t even have to ask the suppliers to fill out any lengthy requirement response spreadsheets / forms yet.

We’ll continue the discussion over the next two days. We’ll also share our procurement methodology pack on Sunday.

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