Buying and Selling, project approach

One of the hardest jobs we have is to give a "competitive" quote for work when the person or business buying is not clear on what they want or need. In fact most businesses have little expertise in buying IT systems and running projects of this type. IT project overruns are legendary and often do not deliver quite as intended.

There are many steps that a business can take to improve the chances of success; the first of these is to have a clear idea of what you want and ensure the people delivering know how to do it and have the right approach. I will return to this theme “of knowing what you want” in the future but for now I will concentrate on achieving the right result by using a structured approach. Organisations that deliver projects should be able to tell you how they will go about delivering the work. In many cases they will have some form of procedure they can show you and talk through, you should be able to discuss who is responsible for the different parts of a project, the deliverables and the timescale.

We have a generic project approach for installing Small Business Server which we have found to be very helpful and often use as a project starting template. Many of the large project and consulting firms have similar processes and templates, although they tend to be more complicated and more expensive!