Thorough RFPs Go a Long Way Toward Successful Unified Communications Deployments

If the term “RFP” makes you or your team glaze over, perhaps you need to take another look at it.

Yes, it’s time-consuming to prepare, but the generation of a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a Unified Communications (UC) solution is a process that requires you, as the prospective buyer, to think hard about what business processes need improvement, how such improvements might make your organization run more efficiently, and which vendors are best suited to meet those needs.

“Creating an RFP is akin to shopping for a car,” says Keith Ennenga, senior technical marketing engineer at ShoreTel. “Ultimately, you want the seller to give you a price that falls within your budget and includes as many of your requested features as possible.”

When shopping for a new vehicle, you might have satellite radio, heated seats and 30-plus miles-per-gallon on your wish list. When you’re in the market for a UC solution, you may want to request features like integration with Microsoft® Outlook®; support for interactive voice response applications; or conference-room phones that support multipoint video feeds. Ennenga says, “An organization in the finance industry will have different requirements than a school will.” The key is pinpointing those requirements and asking three or four vendors to tell you how their products will solve these problems.

Narrow It Down
An RFP, which is in effect a questionnaire you’re asking your top prospective vendors to fill in, is different from a Request for Information (RFI). An RFI is a preliminary step that helps you develop your understanding of the landscape of vendors that might meet your organization’s needs. Recognize that by the time you are to the point of preparing an RFP, it’s best to be pretty serious about choosing one of the vendors who will receive it.

Include a pilot as part of the RFP phase, along with preliminary budgetary considerations and a proposed implementation timeline. The pilot is like a test drive before you buy that new car. Your RFP should include some broad guidelines about the pilot’s scope and duration, Ennenga says. “Typically, you see pilots running anywhere from 30 to 120 days, with 60 days being the most common,” he says. You’ll also want to decide whether to test out a UC solution between two of your branch offices, for example, or in a large department in your organization. Not all details of the pilot are required to go into the RFP. Once you’ve chosen a vendor and/or its professional services partner, you can fine-tune the balance of the details. Be aware that some vendors apply some costs of the pilot toward the cost of an implementation if you choose their solution. If you don’t buy their product, you probably won’t get a refund from the vendor for costs you bore in association with the pilot.

By the Numbers
Much of your RFP will be devoted to getting a sense of the budget commitments your proposed UC solution will require. You’re asking vendors to estimate the costs of hardware and software associated with an implementation that fits your organization. You’re also inquiring about licensing fees, training costs, the cost of maintenance contracts, labor costs, including programming and professional services performed by the vendor or an authorized partner, plus any costs associated with upgrading to future software revisions, for which some vendors charge separately.

“Make sure you know who is doing what part of the work, whether it’s your own IT department, the vendor’s technical sales team, authorized distributors, or other parties,” says Ennenga. Your RFP also needs to address implementation scenarios, with a discussion by each vendor of how each would propose to roll out the type of UC solution you envision for your company.

Allow a few months to complete the RFP, and realize it will entail your IT staff (or your consultants) querying staffers in various departments performing different functions about the degree to which their operations are supported (or not) by the solutions in place now, and what kinds of capabilities would make their jobs easier. All of this information goes toward developing those goals and metrics that will help you build a UC solution that will benefit your organization.

Seek Out Experts
Learn more about preparing RFPs for UC solutions by attending workshops at trade shows, where consultants often compare and contrast RFPs completed by various manufacturers. Many ShoreTel partners maintain libraries of RFPs that companies can customize to their particular needs.

“A good RFP asks vendors how they would solve a particular issue,” Ennenga says. “Maybe you have three office locations, each with its own independent telephone solution, and you want to offer extension-to-extension dialing, interoffice paging and other transparent features like instant messaging or call center agents working from home. As long as the customer knows the business issues he needs addressed, a good vendor should be able to propose workable solutions.”