Identifying Alternative Solutions That Support Acquisition Requirements

This article addresses the most challenging issues in identifying good alternative solutions that meet defined IT acquisition requirements. In identifying alternative solutions, it is useful to determine how other successful organizations have solved the problem. It is also useful to learn what solutions are currently being offered by contractors. These are difficult to do in a course such as this, though you can obtain some information with an Internet search and possibly from your own organization.

By analyzing the alternative solutions, an organization can determine which one will be best for the organization, taking into account the estimates of the costs, benefits, and risks.With this information about the selected solution, the organization is in a position to roughly estimate the funds required and length of the project to implement the solution. In other words, it has a good idea of the budget needed, the length of the project, the staff it may need to make available for the project, and the work the contractor must do. It can then prepare a request for proposal (RFP) from qualified IT services contractors.

Before issuing an RFP, an organization needs to know that there are contractors qualified to respond to the RFP, which describes the solution the buyer (acquirer) organization wants to implement. In a later Activity, you will need to give examples of potential vendors/contractors qualified to implement the solution. These are the "alternative contractors" that need to be identified. (You will not actually prepare an RFP in this course.) Accordingly, there is a difference between alternative solutions and alternative contractors.

The RFP will usually indicate that the buyer is open to improvements of the solution in the RFP. As a result, contractors in their proposals will try to improve on the RFP's solution and may even recommend an entirely different solution. The final contract is negotiated with the contractor that has the best value proposal. The solution to be implemented by the contract may be the one described in the RFP or it may be an entirely different way of solving the problem proposed by a contractor and which the buyer believes is a better value than the solution in the RFP.

IPT Competency. The competency of the IPT, especially the project manager, is very important because it affects almost everything, including the alternatives considered and not considered. As for other potential members, the most talented non-IT stakeholders are usually involved in other important activities and there is often a reluctance to commit them to serving on an IPT. However, management needs to recognize that designing the future of the organization, which the IPT is doing, needs to be done by the most talented staff. Pre-Conceived Solutions. Pre-conceived solutions often prevent other solutions from being seriously considered. Common symptoms of this problem are: (1) all of the alternative solutions are essentially the same solution, with minor variations or (2) one alternative is reasonable (the pre-selected one) and the other two are so poor that management would never select them.

Solution Rigidity. Some individuals argue that there can be no other solution to the problem than the one they want. An IPT can be so tied to an "only solution" that it does not seriously look for or consider alternative solutions. Constantly faced with this problem, one organization decided to form two separate IPTs to study the same critical problem and independently develop alternative solutions. Each IPT demonstrated that there could be--and were--more than one solution to the problem. The teams knew they were in competition, so they most likely made special efforts to avoid the "one solution" syndrome. The organization stressed that special efforts must always be made to identify alternative solutions. Internal Politics. Political factors can present a tough problem. When senior management decides that it wants "X", it can be difficult to convince them they are wrong and that "Y" is better. This is where the phrase "go along to get alone" too often applies because IPT members have fears over promotions, raises, and even job security.

Performance Benchmarking. Some organizations fail to take advantage of benchmarking. One of the best sources of ideas for alternative solutions to solving a performance problem is keeping track of what the most successful organizations are doing. One government agency said it saved many millions of dollars by taking advantage of the costly R&D of a large insurance company. It adopted the very successful claims processing solution developed by the company and had to do relatively minor tailoring to make it fit the agency. Of course, blindly adopting another organization's solution would be a mistake because no two organizations are exactly alike. Even when the solution seems to be an excellent fit, some tailoring is always needed. Using "Cost" to Stimulate IPT Innovation. When there is suspicion that the integrated project team is too constrained in its thinking about alternative solutions, one way of stimulating new alternatives is to ask the team to come up with one or more other solutions that would cost no more than $X (much less than the alternative solutions the team already identified). The team might at first say that this is not possible but then surprise even themselves by coming up with good new alternatives that cost less than $X.

I can attest that a new cost limitation can be a source of creative alternative solutions. It happened to us one time when the chairman of our board cut our fixed-price bid on a three and one-half year project in half because it was a very prestigious project that he wanted to win. He knew he would get much publicity from winning. We won and he did get much publicity throughout the country in many types of media, ranging from television appearances to interviews for national publications. Meanwhile, our team had to figure out how to implement the solution and meet the requirements with one-half the funds we planned for. We got unbelievably creative and it turned out to be very successful. The magnitude of the challenge actually helped to inspire our team. Had the budget not been cut in half, we would never have been so creative.

Accurate Communications With Decision Makers. It is not only a challenge to develop alternative solutions that are acceptable in terms of risk and probable performance results, it can also be a challenge to accurately communicate them to the decision makers. If the alternative solutions are not understandable to the stakeholders, it is a waste of time to identify the alternatives.

Decision makers and other stakeholders, each of which has his or her own interests, need to understand what they will and will not get with each alternative, including the one recommended by the IPT. Stakeholder buy-in requires that they understand and agree with the reasons why they may not get everything they want. Buy-in by stakeholder members of the IPT is not enough; other stakeholders also need to buy-in.

Too often the risks with the recommended solution are intentionally or unintentionally not fully communicated, so it will look more attractive to the executive decision makers. This can help to gain approval for a solution but it can have unfortunate consequences when a played-down risk materializes after the project is approved and is underway.

Also, some organizations, because of resource constraints, have a practice of selecting the least expensive solution identified. The least expensive solution may involve many compromises that are not adequately understood by the decision makers, such as much greater risk than they realize or reduced system performance that may turn out to be unacceptable to users.The compromises and risks must be communicated in an understandable way.

In some cases, the decision makers are not given the information needed to understand which alternative is actually the "best value"--that is, the one that would provide the greatest value for the money invested. This can happen when an IPT prepares a report that does not include adequate quantitative and the qualitative measures of costs, benefits and risks.

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