Anticlue

Request Seller Responses Process

The Request Seller Responses process is when the project manager obtains the quotations, bids and proposals from the vendor. The vendor responses should include how the project requirements can be reached and the costs associated. Just remember there needs to be time for the vendors to generate proposals.

The inputs into the process are:

• Organizational Process Assets – Organizational process assets normally have a list of bidders. For example if one is moving into WOW (workstations on wheels), having a group of vendors listing who have been successful in the organization is key. Once I was going through a pilot, and our COW vendor never delivered the hanging file folders for the ED WOWs. After escalating the issue with the company, the guy showed up with wire ties and metal folders from staples. Needless to say, this vendor was not on the house wide roll out.


• Procurement Management Plan – The Procurement Management Plan details how to manage the procurement. It is good to refer to this and inform the prospective vendors of your internal process.


• Procurement Documents - Procurement documents are from the Plan Contracting process which describe how the seller's response should be presented, provide details about the required product, service, or result. Basically these are a guideline for bids or proposals to your organization.

When obtaining bids from vendors it is a key point to keep in mind, one has to ask for the right information in the right way. Otherwise as a project manager, you may be tagged with favoritism.
So how does one create a sandbox for all vendors to play in and not get into sand ball wars? The tools and techniques recommended from PMI are:

• Bidder Conferences - Bidder conferences are a meeting with all the potential sellers to assure requirements are clear for the project and the bidding process. These are particularly useful for complex, technical, or flexible procurement specifications because they provide a forum for discussion with everyone. An outcome of a bidder conference maybe to change the procurement documentation in order to reflect what sellers are capable of delivering.


• Advertising - Advertising is used to increase the potential seller list by publicly stating the solicitation in magazines, newspapers and other publications.


• Develop a Qualified Sellers List - By working from organizational supplier lists, trade organizations (like himss), or trade magazines, the project manager can determine whether potential sellers are qualified to deliver the product, service, or result required.

Requesting Seller Responses will help assure willing capable sellers are approached for a proposal.
At the end of the Request Seller Responses process, you should have the following outputs:

• Qualified Sellers List - The Qualified Sellers List is a list of vendors who are being asked to submit a proposal.


• Procurement Document Package - The Procurement Document Package is instructions for how the vendor is to respond to the proposal.


• Proposals - Proposals are seller prepared response which details how the seller will deliver the required product, service, or result. Proposals are considered a formal and legal response to the buyer’s request. Sometimes these are followed by on-site vendor presentations.

The road to Good Perceptions is different than to Good Outcomes

In IT, the customer’s perceptions about your organization really equates to how it grows and expands or withers on the vine. It is a vicious cycle, if enhancements and problems are reported to an endless list of work to be done. The resources aren’t focused on the work which needs to be done. Therefore the customer department doesn’t think very positively of the IT department. Once this occurs, then it becomes harder to obtain funds. If the funding engine doesn’t grow, neither does the IT department. A lack of funding for recruitment, new hires, training, or worse existing staff, causes stagnate boiled frog mentality of the it staff. This result circles around to request customer work not getting done. Beginning to see the cycle? Customer perceptions drive growth.

In IT as all other industries good outcomes are driven by efficiency uncovered in process improvements. For example, let’s say you were implementing a evening clinical application support department. This would be a considerable process improvement to get help to the physician and clinician in need in a timely manner. This outcome would be delivered by the hard work of a team of people. It would result in numerous gained operating efficiencies.

However what would be the end result if the evening clinical support analyst was extremely functional technically but had no customer service skills? The efficiencies uncovered would be lost on the customer having to deal with the gruff treatment of the analyst. Remember from Peter Drucker, "Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the customer gets out of it"

That is the key, customer service should be on everyone’s mind - from the CIO to the secretary to the analyst in the field to the technician in the back room. Every one should be able to state the top drivers of customer loyalty and present key topics to them in this manner.

Let’s say a key driver of customer loyalty is concern for the clinician’s time. So the field analyst shows up to help out with the problem at hand. To give the perception we are concerned for the clinician’s time, the analyst should call first and say. “I’m here to help solve the computer problem, if you have a couple of minutes I’ll be right by. However, if you have other pressing things to do, let me know when it is convenient and I’ll drop by then.” When we concentrate on what we communicate, we will begin to see an improvement in perceptions.

To Improve …
Outcomes	Perceptions
Focus on team responsibility	Focus on personal responsibility
Map and study processes	Take action on information – just do it
Understand process variation	Understand customer perceptions
Improve staff competence and skills	Improve staff behaviors and attitudes
Stress what people should be doing	Stress what people should be saying
Seek measureable results	Seek to impact impressions
“Zero defects” thinking	“Best possible” thinking
Eliminate carelessness	Eliminate avoidance

MIA – the productive meeting

I’ve seen a couple productive meetings at my new employer. I’ve come to realize how sorely they were missing from my old employer. At my old employer, I used to spend 6 – 8 hours in meetings reviewing the exact same topics and never obtaining a clear concise tactical or strategic direction. Those directions were done in hallway water cooler, phone call discussions. The meetings were meant to be communicative, but the same information could have been delivered in a report.

For example, the Monday meeting was a 2 hour weekly gathering of executive management of the IS organization. Now in theory, this is a great meeting potential if it had the opportunity for open collaborative team discussion which had some conflict. However in this meeting, the attention getter was a 15 – 30 minute review from the CIO of the contents of Hospital’s Executive Council. Now the information is valuable, but this should have been more of an email distributed so everyone could read. The other problem was that after 15 – 30 minutes of review, without comment from the other members of the team. Next we traversed into a policy review, significant project update, a contract review, and finally wrapping up the meeting by discussing which project where to be reviewed next time.
Items of note:

• the policies were already established and written in draft form. (Also had already been reviewed and approved by the CIO)
• the project updates, where already emailed to the team and stakeholders.
• the contract updates where just where in the process the contract was. Not what the contract was about.
• this was following a 2 hour senior executive management meeting of which the directors did not partake.

That was the Monday meeting, of which you could not miss, had to be there in person, and look thoroughly attentive. Key Participants were CIOs, Sr VPS, AVPS, and Directors. Minutes were taken and distributed to all including the director’s managers by Friday.

Next was the 2 hour leadership Tuesday Meeting, same people as the Monday meeting but including the managers and excluding the CIO. Again in theory a great meeting potential, good group of people bright minds. However in this meeting the attention getter was a 15 – 30 minute review of the minutes from the Monday meeting. Next we traversed into a status update from all teams (missing word quick). Finally we moved onto the review of the scheduled changes into production, a review of the production problems and impacts.
Items of Note:

• the project updates, where already emailed to the team and stakeholders.
• The minutes of the Monday meeting were emailed to the group that week. (So we read outloud minutes which were emailed.
• Minutes were emailed by Friday.

Between the two, I actually found the Tuesday meeting more productive with the review of changes and discussions of what happened to the environment. Open collaboration on how to avoid the mishap from ever happening again would have been welcomed. However, the environment was not structured for that type of collaboration.

So what would my recommendations be? I think the two meetings had a good concept. However first, I’d continue with the Tuesday meeting. Just change the agenda a bit.

• By Entire Leadership Team.
  • Production Events Review with a collaborative discussion on how to prevent in the future.
  • Policy discussion before it was formed. So everyone would participate and buy-in would be across the board.
• By Department
  • Project Updates with a focus on what help was needed from other teams. Also upcoming milestones.
  • Key Metrics being met or missed.
  • Change Management with a focus on impact to the customers and streamlining changes.

For the executive strategic meeting, moving it to a strategic council for maybe 2 hours once a month to discuss two items brought up for discussion from the leadership meeting would be ideal. A strategic decision and direction would be the output of the topic at hand.

For both meetings, I’d recommend starting with an attention getter which got everyone engaged and involved. Not just listening. Again just my thoughts, based upon my experience. A leadership team is powerful but not as a dysfunctional team. Being a part of a functioning leadership team is a great experience and should be treated as such.

Approaches to managing conflict

Conflict in the workplace, can be common place. Here are two approaches to conflict, the positions approach or the interests approach.

Conflict commonly arises when there is a difference of interests or belief that one party will be satisfied and the other will be dissatisfied. This approach is the positions approach and normally isn’t a successful approach.

The interest approach is a way to try to relate the interests so that understanding occurs. For example, here is the motivation, likes, and dislikes. It is based in trying to understand the reason for the different positions. It is a much more successful manner to manage conflict.