Digital Transformation: Requirements gathering & Tender documentation
Once you have finalised your goals and addressed the question of resourcing, the next step is probably the most important and will ultimately decide on the success or failure of your project. Requirements gathering is a multi-stage process that forensically reviews and fully documents your business processes, systems, data and future business requirements to ensure that suppliers submit proposals and costings that fully reflect your brief.
In summary, there are four key stages:
- Business mapping - this documents and reviews how your processes currently work across all departments - and also reviews all the different supporting systems and tools. This identifies how existing processes can be improved, automated, streamlined or replaced.
- Functional requirements - a task based analysis of your CRM & system requirements and how the new system needs to be configured to support the business requirements.
- Data Audit / Data Cleaning - this critical step helps prepare for data migration from old systems to the new systems. This involves extracting existing membership data from all systems in order to perform a data audit that will help clean and correctly format the data, identify missing data, eliminate duplicates and assemble (albeit in spreadsheets) a well structured and reliable ‘single member view’ of all members.
- System review /system audit - finally, a review is required of all the current systems and software that are currently being used to check whether they will technically and functionally fit with the new proposed system.
Make no mistake, these key stages take some time to complete and require a huge amount of painstaking effort and expert resourcing to build solid foundations for stress free project implementation.
Once undertaken, the requirements gathering phase has two major benefits. It provides the organisation with confidence in the specification and scope of its requirements and consequently puts you it in control of negotiations with potential suppliers.
At the same time it also provides suppliers with confidence that the organisation has undertaken the necessary analysis and groundwork to ensure that their proposed CRM or web platform solution will fully meet these needs - without any misunderstandings or requirements for increased budgets.
CEO/SMT questions
- Have we undertaken a complete audit across each department to establish how all our business processes work?
- Are the different systems and tools used for their business processes connected and integrated across the organisation? If not, what are the consequences?
- How do these various systems support our business goals and objectives? Which of these systems do we need to keep and which require replacing or updating?
- Based on this assessment do we have the knowledge and expertise to review and re-design our digital estate? How do we structure our data flows, systems and integration points to achieve a single member view?
- How do we develop or refine our data strategy to support the business? Do we have the resource, skills or capability to undertake a full data audit in preparation for data migration to new CRM or website platforms?
- Have we ensured that a complete review and analysis is fully and accurately documented?
- Do we understand the relationships between processes, data and technology?
- Are we capable of creating a credible and fully scoped tender document that presents our organisation as knowledgable and competent?
- What are the risks and additional costs associated with insufficient requirements gathering and a poorly scoped tender document?
Staff questions
- Process mapping looks incredibly complicated, specialist and detailed work - do we need in-depth training or do we need external help?
- Will this help us find out whether the same business processes are used by other departments? Also, what systems and software do they use - and would any be of use to my department?
- Will it help make my life easier by streamlining and connecting processes across the organisation?
- Have we got the time to get involved in such a lengthly piece of work?
- How will this help ensure the overall success of the project?
Supplier questions
- Can we trust the organisation to have completed tender documentation that fully reflects their data requirements and internal business processes?
- Does the organisation have internal data analysts, business analysts and project managers?
- Are they using external data and digital consultants to undertake the requirements gathering and managing the tendering process?
- What contingency do we need to build into our quotation for additional work if this has not been correctly completed?
- What sample audits do we need to undertake to build confidence?
Without exception, the devil is in the detail for all digital transformation projects and the ‘requirements gathering’ phase is where a full and exhaustive examination of processes, data and systems is absolutely crucial.
Once completed, it enables the organisation to take a holistic view of their current status and future requirements and is therefore the foundation of every digital project.
However, very few organisations have staff with business analyst and data analyst skills to undertake this complex work. It’s often a long journey that requires focus, gritty determination and organisational stamina - so an external consultancy that can lead an organisation through each phase is worth their weight in gold.
In my experience the major reason why projects founder during the implementation is because of inexperience or failures to properly undertake the ‘requirements gathering’ stage. As they say…fail to prepare and prepare to fail!
If you’d like to discuss what you have read above, or learn more, then please contact the author, Ben Sturt, founder and lead consultant at Chrysalis Digital at [email protected] or +447469 768 990 or his colleague David Darrah, Business Development Director at [email protected].
