Planning phase
Read this regardless of your procurement approach.
The second phase is about planning your software development process. Depending on the path you’ve chosen, you may be planning to develop software in-house, or you may be articulating a plan and performance criteria in the form of an RFP that you put out into the market to find a vendor.
At the end of Phase 2, you will have a solid plan for the software development process, and be ready to build it yourself or to find an excellent partner.
Going to market
Writing an RFP is an exciting opportunity to shape a software tool that will help you and your colleagues do your job better. It is a formal document, with legal and budgetary heft, but also a design document. It is your opportunity to describe the ideal partner and set the terms of a productive working relationship. And it is a way of reducing risk and liability, while ensuring a high-quality end product. The RFP will include criteria for evaluating vendors – mandatory (“eliminatory” criteria) and non-mandatory (“optional” criteria). Optional criteria are a good way to include qualitative goals or values.
It is important for the RFP to reflect agile software development processes. It should describe a full software package that addresses the original problem statement, but also break the work into smaller, interoperable modules that can be contracted individually. Using a modular approach not only helps with continuous deployment and integration, but also reduces risk – if the vendor produces low-quality work, lags on time, or balloons over budget, you can easily bid subsequent modules to another vendor.
Building in-house or customizing OSS
If you are building software in-house or creating your own instance of open source software, you will follow a similar process. You will use many of the same tools (modularization, dynamic budgeting, iterative deployment) but instead of writing an RFP that is shared externally, you will be planning and resourcing your own software development process.