Vendor Selection

When shopping for an IT solution for your enterprise, there are two things you should scrutinise: the product (or service) itself and its vendor. Many times, companies overlook the importance of the latter, giving the reason that “it’s only the product we need”.

Wrong.

What about after-sales technical support and training? Ok, so you have an in-house team with the required competency for that IT solution in question… not that I believe it’s reasonable basis to pass up on the expertise that the vendor can provide. How about upgrades, patches, and documentation?

Still unperturbed? Here’s one factor that you may not have started to consider – What happens to your product if the vendor goes bankrupt or gets swallowed by a merger and acquisition? Surely, you no longer believe this is far from possible, do you?

But how are you supposed to know the financial stability of each vendor or whether it is an acquisition target? Well, you can either conduct your own research or you can leave that up to us. Part of our job includes not only establishing linkages in the industry but also being in-the-know on such relevant information.

Evaluation of Business Needs

You can’t separate vendor selection from the process of choosing the desired IT tool. That’s why our vendor selection services starts by defining exactly what your business needs are.

Once we’ve pinned down your needs, we can then narrow down the list of possible IT solutions. Only then can we proceed with the main vendor selection process.

Have you ever been caught in a situation wherein you thought you knew what you wanted, only to end up realising it’s not what you were looking for after all? We’re here to make sure you don’t get caught in that kind of situation when choosing an enterprise-class IT solution.

With the TCO (total cost of ownership) of such solutions typically running up to hundreds of thousands of euros, you can’t afford to arrive at what you really want by way of trial and error.

These are the things you stand to benefit the moment we start working with you:

  • Thorough assessment of your IT needs. We’ll consult the people in your organisation who’ll be affected the most in order to obtain a clear picture of what your specific needs really are. Most IT solution purchases are made with very little consultation that, after installation, many of the end users don’t benefit at all.
  • Minimal interruption during assessment. As with all our other services, we see to it that the interruptions we make are absolutely necessary. So the moment we start with our work, you can still continue with yours.
  • Insightful suggestions of the required IT solution. You still know your business better. So even after we’ve gone through the assessment and given our recommendations, the decision as to what IT tool should be pursued will still be up to you. The difference now is, you’ll be making a decision based on expertly gathered information put forward in an insightful proposal.

Request and Evaluation of Vendor Proposals

With so many IT solutions companies mushrooming, it is becoming more difficult to keep track of them, their specialities, strengths, and weaknesses.

Companies selling best-of-breed products may be relatively easy to spot. But there are also other attributes that are equally important but not as well publicised. For instance, which companies offer better quality management philosophies? Which companies have strategic visions running parallel to yours? Which of them possess implementation capabilities that can cater to your rapidly growing IT requirements?

Vendors who answer positively to these queries need to be given the appropriate importance in the selection process. We see to it that these and other relevant attributes are factored into our scorecards and evaluation processes.

These are the things you can look forward to when you grant us the opportunity to serve you.

  • Experience is a vital item in our vendor selection criteria. Our vast knowledge of the reliable players in the industry will lead you to experienced vendors who can hit the ground running from day one and continue with the same vigour onward.
  • We can help you draw positive response for each of your Request For Proposals (RFPs) or Request For Information (RFIs). Did you expect these vendors to be enthusiastic in sending out proposals each time you asked them to? Think again. You’ll have to persuade them first of your sincerity to become a potential customer. With our help, your RFPs will make preferred vendors see “opportunity” written all over.
  • No need to go “Eany, meeny, miny, moe”. Deciding which vendors should move up in the selection process can take up a lot of time if you don’t know which criterion should be given more weight. Our scorecards are designed to collect the most relevant information and to generate results that will help you decide on these matters at a glance.

Interview, Negotiation, and Monitoring

As soon as you start getting positive response to your Request For Proposals, the interview process should be next. It’s at this point that vendors can present and highlight their strengths while we try to glean as much information of their true capabilities as well as their dedication to the project.

Some companies can provide proof-of-concepts and we may require them as part of the interview process. This will not only give us a better idea as with regards to their product’s capabilities, but also to their level of expertise on the solution in question.

  • We’ll help you set up the interview process and organise the evaluation committee. Members of the committee will typically include representatives from each department that will be affected by the new technology, which we would have already identified during our Evaluation of Business Needs.
  • Since our scorecards are designed to expedite the filtering and selection process, you may eventually be able to choose the finalists yourself. However, in the event that two or more vendors turn out evenly matched, we’ll help you identify the better company.
  • We’re very familiar with the price ranges of various IT solutions, including the effects on price of certain variables. As such, we can tell you whether a product’s price tag is justified or not.
  • Our exceptional familiarity on both the IT industry and the entire negotiation processes itself will give you the edge when it’s time for us to haggle for the best bang for the buck.
  • After the contract is awarded, we’ll even be on hand to monitor whether deliverables are handed over and milestones are achieved as promised.

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Strategy and Portfolio Management

 

A well planned strategy is the necessary bridge between brilliant leadership and excellent execution. Without it, your entire organisation cannot hope to respond quickly and effectively to challenges and changes within the landscape on which it operates.

Strategic planning involves identifying objectives, understanding what resources are needed to attain them, and then allocating the resources to the appropriate units to ensure they are used optimally towards the achievement of desired objectives. Among the end results which can be reflected by your team members are:

  1. Deeper understanding of the competitive environment;
  2. Snappy execution of plans;
  3. Faster, more aligned actions; and
  4. More intelligent and apt responses against strategic moves of the competition.

We understand the need to institute strategic management in such a way that your organisation can easily adapt to unforeseen developments. As such, all our solutions are formulated to make your organisation not only well-guided but also as dynamic as possible.

Strategy Formulation

Before you can proceed to map out any strategy for your company, you’ll have to study your company’s current environment. This will help you determine what courses of action should be taken to be able to navigate through such environment on your way to the end goal.

If you’re not a full time strategist, such a task can either be very daunting or deceivingly easy… the former can prevent your team from getting started, while the latter can lead your team astray.

Ideally, strategy formulation should be carried out as quickly and as efficiently as possible so you can move on to implementation before the competition can react. Our methods can enable your leaders to hit the ground running each time they set out on a strategic plan.

How?

  • We can assist in accurately applying strategic tools like SWOT and Gap analysis, then help integrate the results into an effective strategic plan.
  • We’ll train your team how to carry out effective research techniques so that the information they gather will really be what we need. This is because the tools mentioned earlier can only work effectively if the inputs were picked intelligently. Of course, if you want the entire process expedited, we can also conduct the research ourselves.
  • We’ll establish best practices for top-down, bottom-up, and collaborative strategic management processes. We’ll even show you how to organise and hold meetings where team members are constantly engaged and in-sync, so action plans can be developed and relayed fast.
  • We’ll see to it that strategies for all functional departments (such as IT management, supply-chain, HR, marketing, and legal) are in line with your business strategies, which should in, turn be aligned with your overall corporate strategy.

Strategy Evaluation

Your strategies have to be periodically assessed if you want to determine whether they are attuned to variations affecting your organisation. These changes may include new technologies, emerging competitors, new opportunities, as well as unexpected developments in the economic environment and political climate.

While no time limit is imposed for the build-up of resources vital to the attainment of a specific objective, the window of opportunity can shut on you before you can start amassing such resources. Given this possibility, it is important for your strategies to undergo evaluation processes that will determine whether you should pursue them or not.

Using only the most reliable evaluation techniques, we’ll help you establish whether:

  • Your strategies will place your company in a position that will give it competitive advantage or will erode whatever advantage the competition already has;
  • Your strategies are consistent with the landscape on which your company currently traverses;
  • They are realistic enough in relation to the resources you have on hand;
  • The associated risks have all been identified and the appropriate control measures have already been put in place;
  • The time frames for their full realisation are both realistic and acceptable.

Portfolio Management

In today’s highly competitive market, many of the more successful enterprises are driven by project-based systems.

Now, there’s always a tendency for project managers to become overenthusiastic and to come up with a number of projects that can’t be sustained by available resources. If your project-based company frequently runs out of resources, then either you just have too many projects running or too much is being allocated to a select few.

In both instances, the problem does not necessarily lie on the individual project managers themselves. Rather, what is needed is the ability to have full control over existing projects and investments.

Your leadership should be able to rank projects in terms of their impact to your organisation’s growth, positioning, and profitability. This will give you sufficient information when deciding which projects to pursue, prioritise, or shut down. These are the benefits you’ll gain from our services:

  • A vivid presentation of the big picture. Only when you can step back from all the detail and see the interplay of investments and resources will you be able to make wise decisions regarding how and where to position them.
  • The ability to distinguish between projects with the highest potentials and those that are outdated.
  • Access to expertise that will help you distribute your present IT infrastructure, human resources, financial resources, and facilities across running projects to obtain the biggest benefits for all stakeholders.

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Which KPI?s to Use in CRM

Customer relationship management emerged in the 1980?s in the form of database marketing. In those tranquil pre-social media days, the possibility of ?managing? clients may have been a possibility although Twitter and Facebook took care of that. Modern managers face a more dynamic environment. If you are one, then what are the trends you should be monitoring yourself (as opposed to leaving it to others).

If you want to drip feed plants, you have to keep the flow of liquid regular. The same applies to drip-feed marketing. Customers are fickle dare we say forgetful. Denizon recommends you monitor each department in terms of Relationship Freshness. When were the people on your list last contacted, and what ensued from this?

Next up comes the Quality of Engagements that follow from these efforts. How often do your leads respond at all, and how many interfaces does it take to coax them into a decision? You need to relate this to response blocks and unsubscribes. After a while you will recognise the tipping point where it is pointless to continue.

Response Times relate closely to this. If your marketing people are hot then they should get a fast response to sales calls, email shots and live chats. It is essential to get back to the lead again as soon as possible. You are not the only company your customers are speaking too. Fortune belongs to the fast and fearless.

The purpose of marketing is to achieve Conversions, not generate data for the sake of it. You are paying for these interactions and should be getting more than page views. You need to drill down by department on this one too. If one team is outperforming another consider investing in interactive training.

Finally Funnel Drop-Off Rate. Funnel analysis identifies the points at which fish fall off the hook and seeks to understand why this is happening. If people click your links, make enquiries and then drift away, you have a different set of issues as opposed to if they do not respond at all.

You should be able to pull most of this information off your CRM system if it is half-decent, although you may need to trigger a few options and re orientate reporting by your people in the field. When you have your big data lined up speak to us. We have a range of data analysts brimming over with fresh ideas.

Implementing Large-Scale Complex Business Change

Sometimes, driving your people to work harder is not enough for your organisation to withstand the pressures laying siege to it. With uncertain economic conditions, unpredictable fresh competition, and looming threats from the environment or even pandemic-grade diseases, empowering your people to not only ‘think’ but also to ‘step’ out of the box is currently the name of the game.

However, such initiatives typically require sweeping changes throughout your entire organisation … and to think even the slightest change is often met with hard resistance.

Whether you’re about to undergo an M&A, relocate due to a major catastrophe, scale down to a skeletal workforce, or implement a brand-new company-wide strategy, our systematic approach to large-scale complex business change can help you make the transition as seamless as possible.

We understand the importance of the human aspect in change management. That is why we’ll focus on making your people appreciate the benefits of having to learn new skills, perform new tasks, employ modern technologies, and go through new processes in order to tone down the resistance level.

Our entire process spans from top to bottom, wherein we’ll start with your sponsors, down to your managers, and then to other stakeholders in making them appreciative of the needed changes and in order to achieve alignment with your organisation’s goals. Our top to bottom approach is also aimed at casting a positive “shadow of the leader” on people down the line, enabling them with an optimistic view despite the gruelling tasks before them.

We invite you to have a look at the steps we take in implementing large-scale complex business change to win over a strong and lasting commitment to it.

Evaluating the Required Change

Large-scale complex business change initiatives can be implemented expeditiously and economically if you’ve clearly defined the scope of the change as well as the forces that shape your organisation. You’ll want to know which areas yield easily and which are hard to change to determine where and how you’re going to focus more of your efforts on.

To arrive at a sound and systematic plan, we first gather as much information as needed and analyse them. We determine whether your departments have the required capabilities and how we can arrive at a clear organisational alignment. That way, we don’t waste time, effort and resources when the moment comes to carry out the plan.

These are some of the diagnostic procedures we perform in evaluating the required change.

  • Change complexity analysis. We’ll assess the contribution of people and task factors to the overall complexity of the change project. This will help us determine how to approach the problem efficiently.
  • Causal analysis. By establishing cause and effect relationships, we can identify root or circular causes. This will allow us to pinpoint problem areas and prevent a repetition of past mistakes.
  • Structural analysis. Any company is propped up by a number of structures: organisational, process, motivational, social, and physical, among others. Understanding the structures that drive, motivate, hamper, connect, and influence your people’s behaviours can provide insights as to how or where structural change can best be executed.
  • Context analysis. We’ll look into market forces as well as political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental factors enveloping your business. We’ll also analyse your driving objectives, organisational alignment, and organizational capabilities. By analysing the internal and external environment in which your business currently operates, we can formulate a customised strategic and effective plan of action.

Managing Stakeholders

Change initiatives won’t prosper without total commitment from all stakeholders. Stakeholders refer to people in your organisation who either have interests in the change project or can be affected by it.

We deal with your stakeholders starting from the top because if we can’t gain full commitment from those already in the best position to spur the diverse entities in your company into active cooperation, striving to secure commitment from other areas will be futile.

That is, if you don’t have the full support of your key and principal sponsors, i.e. the people who have the biggest say and have greatest control over resources in your organisation, you can’t hope to sustain the change endeavour, let alone provide the much needed spark to get it started.

Here’s how we carry out our stakeholder management actions.

  • Conduct research to identify all stakeholders: the sponsors, your internal and external partners, the main targets of the change, and all interested parties. That way you can “switch on” implementors of each change action in the proper sequence.
  • Not everyone will offer resistance to your change endeavours. We’ll help you identify those stakeholders and sponsors who are willing to offer support, evaluate the level of support they are willing to give, harness all available supports and utilise them extensively to benefit the change.
  • Gain a deeper understanding as to why certain stakeholders are willing to lend support. In doing so, we can implement the right strategies that will encourage them to continue supporting you.
  • Assemble a leadership team that will champion your change initiatives. We’ll facilitate effective collaboration among its team members, transforming them into a cohesive force designed to carry out plans and motivate everyone else down the line.
  • Upon realisation of the change project, we’ll see to it that all stakeholders get a taste of the carrot at the end of the stick. This will encourage them to continue active cooperation in future change initiatives.

Planning for the Change

Anyone who has experienced having their car stuck in the mud knows that stepping on the accelerator will only get the vehicle trapped even deeper. Without the aid of a towing truck, getting the car out will require careful planning since different combinations of pulling, pushing, lifting, rocking to-and-fro, and stepping on the accelerator may be needed.

Of course, some combinations are just better than others. The same principle holds when effecting change.

Our approach to change management typically varies depending upon the information we obtain from the different analyses performed earlier. For instance, since not all organisations are suitable for a collaborative approach, we will employ either collaborative, consultative, directive, or coercive change management strategies wherever applicable.

A well-planned change will result in a smoother, less costly, and less disruptive transition. Here’s how we’ll help you plan your change initiatives.

  • When put in a predicament similar to the car-in-the-mud, the basic strategy entails identifying the current resisting forces and predicting what other resisting forces may be encountered along the way. After researching and pointing out your organisation’s resistance forces, we’ll lay out the most appropriate facilitation, education, and negotiation techniques.
  • To bring down wastage to the lowest possible levels, we’ll engineer a change delivery plan that involves the most cost-effective sequence of driver, process, technology, organisational, and people alignment.
  • To win and maintain a high level of trust, confidence and commitment from all sponsors and stakeholders, we’ll present a clear road map of the change process as well as landmarks that will prove how far we will have gone. These landmarks will then be brought to each sponsor’s and stakeholder’s attention each time they are arrived at in order to build up assurance and continued commitment.
  • We’ll design measurement tools and schedule reporting deadlines so that you’ll know what to look forward to and when to expect them.

Managing the Change

Your company will hold a better chance of maintaining a sizeable lead over the rest of the pack if you constantly establish a rally point and instil in your stakeholders the drive to rally to that point from the get-go. To make this happen, your company must undertake the unfreezing, transition, and refreezing phases of change skilfully in order to bring all stakeholders into the right mindset.

Our specialists’ systematic and efficient methods for each of these phases are designed to simplify the management of each phase as well as provide a seamless shift from one phase to the next. This is what we’ll do:

  • Set up a change project management office to ensure that everything associated with the change initiative is given the needed attention and resources even while all the other usual processes in your organisation run concurrently.
  • To unfreeze your people and get them started on the road of change, we’ll employ unfreezing techniques wherever they are most appropriate. We’ll resort to different kinds of methods ranging from presenting persuasive evidence justifying the need for change to showing a motivational vision for inspiring your people to embark on the change process.
  • Since it is during the transition phase when your people can find themselves groping in the dark, we’ll offer executive coaches for your senior managers; facilitators to provide guidance during team meetings and other change activities; coaches to educate and inspire them to meet the change with the right attitude; trainers to teach new systems, procedures, and technologies; as well as employ a variety of other techniques in order to make the transition phase as seamless as possible.
  • Although your people should always be ready to undertake the next major change after a previous one, there should be points in between where they can taste the spirit of success, establish a temporary base to rejuvenate, and immediately gain a deeper understanding of the nearby terrain so as to envision the next rally point. We’ll see to it that this vital phase of change is carried out completely.

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