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How a pivot turned 3000 lines of requirements into clarity for a District Council procurement process.
The District Council had end-of-life Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems that needed to be replaced.
Timelines were ambitious and the availability of key subject matter experts from across the Council was extremely limited.
ERP/CRM requirements for a neighbouring district council were to be used as a starting point to scope the replacement and inform Registrations of Interest and Request for Proposal activities to select the new solutions and delivery partners.
Sixteen 2-3 hour workshops were scheduled over three weeks to review, revise, and prioritise over 3000 lines of borrowed requirements.
After the first week of workshops it was obvious the timeline meant there was no breathing space to reflect, think, and simplify. The knock-on impact of this was the risk of missed opportunity to take advantage of the streamlined capabilities and efficiencies of a modem ERP/CRM solution.
To improve the quality of the outcomes needed, Redvespa suggested a significant pivot.
Rather than reviewing the borrowed requirements line by line, the focus of each workshop shifted to understanding core requirements, the outputs and outcomes the solution needed to support, and any highly specific functions and processes.
The remaining workshops happened, engagement and buy-in of subject matter experts increased, and the quality of the workshop output increased.
Requirements were simplified and grouped into key themes. They were deliberately kept high level and focused on what not how. Several hundred requirements ended up being defined, prioritised, and incorporated into the ROI and RFP tender documents.
Effort went into helping subject matter experts and key stakeholders understand the procurement process, how and when the requirements would be elaborated into more detail, and what things the vendor would be responsible for.
During the RFP process, potential vendors asked fewer than 10 questions from several hundred requirements. This highlighted the benefit of the pivot, the quality of the simplified requirements, and the clarity Redvespa was able to provide.
