European Professional Services Firm - Strategic IT Sourcing and Tender Optimization
Tender optimization and negotiation support to renew the entire IT infrastructure landscape, including the establishment of a private cloud and digital workplaces.
Initial Situation
The company is a well-established firm with a European footprint offering high-class professional services. Due to age, architectural limitations, and missing functionalities, the IT infrastructure landscape did not meet the future requirements of the company's growth path.
Therefore the company's corporate IT started conversations with renowned IT providers, defined requirements, and issued a tender. Functionalities such as the establishment of a private cloud, readiness to utilize public cloud at a larger scale, a modern digital workplace concept, as well as requirements for operations, IT security, licensing, and financial aspects, had been included.
During the tender process, project management realized a few issues:
- due to the size and uniqueness of the tender content, the project team got to some extent overwhelmed with the complexity of the offering details
- although the offerings met the specified requirements, financial and functional comparability was not entirely given
- the project was still missing a grading mechanism that was easy to understand on the one hand, as well as reflecting the needs of corporate IT, finance, and the board as final decision-makers on the other hand
- it was in question whether the negotiation sessions would be as effective, fair, and target-oriented as possible, with only members of the project team and the vendor at the table
Overall Goal
The goal of the project was to optimize the tender and support the negotiations, in particular:
- Review the tender documents and requirements specifications
- Provide suggestions to optimize the tender structure and the negotiation process
- Perform co-create sessions to work on specific elements of the tender documentation
- Provide options and a final grading mechanism for the offerings
- Support the negotiation sessions with the client, providing an outside view and targeted questions
Project Concept
The following approach has been taken to provide an independent analysis & discussion of the newly developed IT strategy:
- Settings session with the project lead and the related board member
- Review of the existing tender documents
- On-going and timed support in the form of analysis, workshops, and negotiation support
- LAFO support and final recommendation
Project Duration
The project length for optimizing the tender and providing negotiation support was approximately 10 weeks.