Orientation phase

Read this regardless of your procurement approach.

The first phase is about creating a solid foundation for buying and using digital products. Capacity-building starts long before there is any specific software project. Product owners should spend time meeting staff members from various departments, hosting Q&A workshops, debunking myths about government procurement, establishing common language (“agile” “DevOps” “exclusionary criteria”), and sharing the basics of agile software development. The goal is to build up your colleagues’ familiarity with three main things: first, with the steps and objectives of legitimate public sector procurement; second, with contemporary software development processes; and third, with effective design research methods.

With a shared foundation, we are ready to begin a specific software process. The next step is to use discovery research methods to understand the challenge or opportunity, define user needs, and develop ideas about potential solutions. The goal is to arrive at a precise problem statement.

A good sense of the problem allows us to evaluate potential solutions that might already exist in the market – including off-the-shelf software and open source software (OSS). If nothing good exists, the problem statement also helps with estimating the costs of building software in-house, adapting OSS, or contracting a custom solution.

These options should be evaluated in a neutral way, accounting not only for cost, but also for quality, long-term lifecycle costs of ownership and maintenance, and potential unforeseen concerns like vendor lock-in and data ownership.

Phase 1 ends with a choice of strategy. Depending on the approach, you will follow one of four paths:

1. Buy software off the shelf
2. Contract a vendor to build a custom instance of open source software (OSS)
3. Contract a vendor to build custom software
4. Build software (or adapt OSS) in-house

Read on

Read all of the orientation phase steps regardless of your procurement approach.