Campus Financial Systems for the Future

Reviewing Alternative Strategies

Whether or not the work of the steering committee and other project teams has identified a preferred acquisition strategy, the project management team will need to review the parameters of these alternatives so that a recommendation along these lines can be made to the steering committee in this post-requirements-identification stage of the project.

Some institutions will find a variety of possible alternative solutions for the specified requirements, and the final solution may require some intuitive decision-making based on a large number of inputs and opinions. This is not uncommon in most decision processes. However, the process should utilize objective measurements to the greatest extent possible. This is necessary not only to reach the best possible decision, but also to ensure that the process is perceived to be fair by all internal and external stakeholders.

While variations are possible, the fundamental alternatives include the following:

Buy an off-the-shelf software product from a vendor if most requirements can be met, planning to work with the vendor to provide any missing critical functionality
Develop or migrate a system in-house with the internal IT organization to meet requirements
Partner with a vendor and/or other institutions to develop a system to meet requirements

Note that all the possible options involve some kind of partnering, which in turn implies shared responsibilities among the partners. The decision to buy from a vendor or to partner with a vendor and/or other institution(s) implies a partnership with the internal information technology organization to help with integration/deployment and technical support. The in-house development option clearly implies a partnership between the IT organization and the financial area.

Based on responses to the functionality and technology requirements of the RFI, the project management team will decide which respondents should be invited for technical and end-user demonstrations or presentations. To help narrow the field, the team should request a list of customers who have purchased the product or used the service with success. Some vendors provide complete customer lists, but quite often this information is not supplied. It is important to identify possible peer institutions who are among the vendor's customers and make contact with them. A key question to ask these institutions with comparable production scalability is whether the system meets their expectations. Unless your institution has the time and/or desire to develop a system or partner with a vendor to do so, you will want to choose products that are already running successfully at similar institutions.

A potential land mine with regard to campus visits by vendors at this stage is that they are usually not yet dealing with costs or timelines, and thus can make "blue sky" presentations that can seduce an audience into buying into the product or service before the project management team can verify the reality of the proposed solution. If the solution does not check out, the team will be in the position of having to disenchant an already "sold" set of users. However, such visits can be very valuable in narrowing the possibilities and testing the reality of the project management's choice of alternatives.

After campus visits have been completed and all information submitted has been reviewed sufficiently to get a sense of whether, and how, the required results will be achievable, the project management team will:

reevaluate priorities, especially if any high-priority functionality was left unaddressed by all respondents;
reevaluate implementation schedule/timing constraints, if any additional information indicates the current strategy may not be viable; and
refine financial projections, based on initial purchase/investment estimates and implementation costs, as well as projected operating costs (support and upgrade requirements).

At this point the team should be in a position to confirm or question the acquisition strategy proposed by the steering committee or, if the steering committee has not made a recommendation in this area, to suggest an appropriate strategy, given the results of the investigation thus far. With approval from the steering committee to pursue the recommended alternative, it is now time to begin a more thorough investigation of the potential vendor products or partners and thus to consider appointing a selection team to carry out the remaining detailed analysis tasks affiliated with these efforts.

Sidebar:

Buy, Build, or Partner?

[Previous] [Next]