Step Four - the technical requirements
Section four should contain your key technical requirements designed to ensure that the solution fits on your current and planned IT infrastructure and can be supported by your current ICT department with their skill set.
We also recommend summarising in this section all the volumetric data you have been able to gather albeit with some caveats. Volumetrics are useful because although they are unlikely to prove completely accurate they can provide a set of assumptions and a baseline against which the suppliers can quote. Once the preferred supplier is selected and the project moves on then you can refer to the assumptions and baseline figures and use those to agree the actual costs for a specific number of users in a specific phase. It also enables you to accurately compare the costs of the different suppliers you are evaluating.
User numbers
The key volumetrics to start with will be the number of users for each phase of the project and an indication of the roles and responsibilities. These figures should be as detailed as possible for the model office and pilot and indicative for the roll out phases.
Examples of some of the roles and responsibilities will include:
Operators (scanner operators)
Users with read only access
Users with create, edit and save rights
Records management staff who can create folders
Supervisors/team leaders
Managers
System administrators
A difficult calculation to make is how many users will be online and active on the system at any one time. The figures will be relatively high for administrative staff and then lower for academic staff who may be lecturing etc at various times during the day.
