After determining your project scope and requirements, use this guide to create a request for proposal (RFP) to send to the vendors on your list.
Here we've compiled a list of questions that you might want to include in your RFP. Use this list as a guide and trim away the pieces you don't need. Try to limit your product-related questions to those that are critical to your organization and keep it short, but complete.
The reason: When you send lengthy lists of product requirements to vendors, you'll get back lengthy responses that are virtually impossible to compare. Focus on your top 10 requirements, and you will find it much easier to contrast vendors and make an informed decision.
When evaluating the vendor responses, consider assigning weightings to the requirements to ensure that your most important requirements are ranked highest as you score the candidates.
Introduce yourself—provide a statement of your current status
Statement of goals, concerns, and objectives
- Describe your service management automation goals, the problems you are trying to solve, and any relevant metrics you are hoping to improve.
- State the greatest concerns for company management relative to service management, customer satisfaction, digital transformation, and business efficiency, and explain how you expect this tool to contribute.
Describe your interoperability requirements in detail
- List the tools you have, and note your preference for a tool with the specific APIs you need for things like configuration, infrastructure, and monitoring. Ask vendors to comment about interoperability in those three areas.
- Ask how much effort it will take to integrate their product with your toolset using their APIs/openAPI.
- Provide an inventory of the kind of data (often bi-directional) you need to support, and ask them to explain in detail what their product can do in those areas.
- Ask how their tools interoperate with cloud-native apps.
- Ask how their tools capture information from the cloud.
- Ask how easy it is to switch between cloud-based and on-premises services.
Request specific details about ease of use
Today's ESM buyers are looking for products that are less complicated to implement, upgrade, license, and maintain, particularly in light of the many integrations needed to make enterprise services flow properly.
- Ask how much effort is required to implement and maintain their product.
- Ask how much effort is needed to upgrade to a new version, including all of the integrations that have been implemented.
- Ask them to describe their approach to licensing and license management.
- If you are having problems with the products you already own, describe how they are falling short—how they create too much work for your team or what capabilities they lack—and explain what you expect a new solution to provide.
- Be transparent about what you don't have and why you think it will help you to have it. Vendors and service providers can be valuable partners, so be frank about the issues you face with your current tools. They may surprise you with fresh ideas and strategies.
Statement of resources
- Explain the job titles and skillsets of the people who will use the tool.
Infrastructure requirements
- List the main elements of your environment that are relevant to the tool usage:
- Operating systems
- Hardware
- Databases
- DevOps frameworks/pipeline
- Cloud strategy
Vendor information
Here are sample questions to ask the vendors. Our list covers a lot of ground, but you probably won't need to ask all of them in your RFP. If you don’t have a mainframe, for example, there’s no need to ask about that. Trim this list as required to meet your needs:
- What is your company, history, and ITSM/ESM focus?
- Who is the primary contact for sales? Who is the primary contact for technical questions?
- Do you have reference customers that can be contacted?
Products and capabilities
This section helps you understand the product, the vendor's approach to service management, and any innovations the vendor offers.
- List your product or products and the primary category of each.
- List the scope of operations the tool was designed for.
- What kinds of skills are required to use this tool?
- What browsers do you support?
- What devices do you support?
- What platforms do you support?
- Can your product handle services that are provided by mainframe apps?
- Which continuous integration/continuous delivery tools do you support?
- How easy is it to integrate your product with the other tools I currently use?
- How easy is it to extend your product?
- What types of reporting and analytics capabilities does the product provide? Is integration with a third-party reporting tool required for minimum reporting?
- What are the features or innovations that differentiate you from your competitors?
Deployment, updates, and support
- Is your product or service offered on-premises, as a cloud service, or as a hybrid solution?
- Does deployment require a consulting engagement?
- Do you offer guided consulting to assist during implementation?
- How often do you release new versions or update the software?
- Do you offer support? What are the terms of your support contracts?
- What training options do you offer?
Next steps
There has never been a better time to get started with ESM, or to expand your ESM footprint. The vendor market has solidified, the benefits are increasingly obvious, and the tools are getting easier to use. Most importantly, some of your competitors are probably already using ESM in some areas and will continue to exploit that competitive edge over you until you enter the game.
Done right, ESM can become the platform for your organization’s back-office digital transformation. Back-office operations are often overlooked in the drive to achieve digital transformation. But when companies fail to address the operational side, they haven’t really transformed the business.
As a 2019 World Economic Forum paper said: "Customer engagement is essential, great product and services are mandatory, and an innovative economic model may be table stakes, but without operations all of that fails." In some cases, "Back-office actually becomes front-office, as non-IT departments expose their services to their employees and customers, which in turn, requires them to become service-centric organizations," said Pott.
Get started today. Using the information and guidance in this document, assemble a team with the right players, step with them through the fundamental considerations, and get a viable ESM project underway. With the right sponsor, team, and ESM technologies in place, you'll embark on a journey of continuous improvement that will keep your organization competitive and add value to the entire business for many years to come.
Key takeaways
- Try to limit your product-related questions to those that are critical to your organization and keep it short. When you send lengthy lists of product requirements to vendors, you'll get back lengthy responses that are virtually impossible to compare.
- In the RFP, include your goals, concerns, and objectives.
- Spell out your interoperability requirements in detail; include your current tools and an inventory of the data you need to support.
- Get information about maintenance and support, as well as license requirements.
- Find out about the vendor; ask about company history, primary sales/support contacts, and customer references.
- Get details about the product's features, functions, scope, platforms supported, and how easy or difficult it would be to extend or customize.
- Get going! Done correctly, ESM can become the platform for your organization's back-office digital transformation.
Read next:
The Forrester WAVE: Enterprise Service Management
To print the full report, or read the entire report offline, download the complete Special Report: Buyer's Guide to Service Management Products as an ebook.
