The more people find out about the Internet, the more they want to know. A peek at the Internet's treasures can pique the interest of even the most skeptical would-be Luddite. But anyone who has experienced the steep learning curve associated with surfing the Net knows that a good teacher can make all the difference. An expert tour guide can determine whether Internet access becomes a cost-effective productivity booster or an expensive time-waster.
When you begin searching for a trainer or consultant to guide you and your business through the sometimes stormy Internet waters, you must establish certain criteria. You want to select a provider who can truly meet the needs of your company, someone who can show you how the Internet can help you be more productive. You don't want a person who leaves you feeling that the Internet is simply an overpriced technical toy. This chapter discusses how you can ensure that the trainer or consultant you select will meet your unique needs.
From the very beginning, you must remember that your needs are unique; every profession, every organization, and every individual has a different set of needs and expectations of what technology can do for them. Just as a good word processing class for secretaries is likely to differ substantially in content from a class designed for technical writers, an Internet presentation or consultation should take into account the specific focus of your organization. You shouldn't settle for a one-size-fits-all solution—no such creature exists, and a good Internet training or consulting company knows that.
This requirement doesn't mean that every presentation must be built from ground zero; few of us have the funds available to demand that level of customization. However, you can evaluate potential providers to make sure that they understand your specific needs and are prepared to make presentations or offer advice based on those needs. What works for a public relations company may not be appropriate for a publisher, and what makes the Internet worthwhile to a financial brokerage firm may be very different from what justifies the expense to a retailer.
So how do you make sure that your trainer or consultant can meet your needs? The first step is a simple one but often overlooked. You must do a detailed needs assessment. After all, if you don't know what your requirements are, communicating those needs to your prospective provider may be difficult. Think about purchasing a car—would you be likely to go to a dealership first and ask the salesperson to pick out the best car for you? Or would you look around, think about what you really need, and then negotiate with a dealer for the vehicle you know will meet your needs? Most of us would take the latter route—and you should do the same thing when making a decision about training or consulting services.
The next section in this chapter takes an in-depth look at the needs assessment process for training and consulting services. Then you learn the process of designing an effective Request for Proposals (RFP) for those services. Finally, the chapter describes the evaluation and selection process leading to a final decision.
To structure your needs assessment, you must anticipate the questions a prospective service provider is likely to ask—or questions they should ask if they genuinely want to serve your needs. In some ways, your needs assessment is as much about what the provider needs to know as it is about what you need to receive.
To begin, you must identify the expected recipients of the services you require. Do you need training or consulting services for your technical staff? For managers? For customers? For yourself? Without a clearly defined audience, most training and consulting services are bound for failure. What a network system administrator needs to know about the Internet may be quite different from the needs of a marketing staff member or the concerns of a manager focusing on bottom-line issues. Before you can complete any other questions in your assessment, you need to know who in your organization will be the consumer of these services.
The next question seems simple on its face, but it provides the framework for the rest of the assessment. In its most general form, the question is "What are our goals for this project?" More specifically, you need to determine what information you want the trainer or consultant to bring to your organization. For a training project, what skills do you expect participants to gain from the presentations? For a consultant, what information do you expect him or her to provide for you, and for what purpose? Although the answer to this question may shift as you continue with your needs assessment, or even in the process of receiving the services, it is important to frame the question early and use it as a point of reference for the rest of your assessment. Keeping the answer general is fine; this chapter deals more with specifics as it progresses through the needs assessment process.
The next question to consider is "What do we already know?" If you're new to the Internet, you may be tempted to say "nothing," but that answer often is an exaggeration. The fact that you're reading this book means that you already know more about the Internet than most people. By informing the prospective provider of what you already know, you ensure that you will not pay him or her to teach the material to you again. The best use of your funds is to get information not easily available in your organization. You may be surprised at how many organizations hire consultants at exorbitant rates to tell them things that the systems administrator down the hall already knows. To protect yourself from this sort of mistake, consider these specific questions:
The obvious follow-up question to "What do we know?" is "What don't we know?" Don't answer in the broadest sense of the question but in relation to what your goals for the training or consulting project are. If you want consulting on how to connect to the Internet, and you already know what the primary options are, what you don't know may be how to implement those options or what the associated costs may be. If you need training on how to use Internet communication features, and you already are familiar with electronic mail on your local area network, the focus of your presentation should be on the specifics of Internet communications, not on the advantages and uses of electronic mail or a comparison of e-mail software features. If you're looking for a trainer to show your already Internet-competent staff how to train others on use of the Internet, what you don't know is what training techniques and methods will be most useful in the training process. Knowing what you don't need is as important as knowing what you do need. This knowledge can prevent you from contracting unnecessary services and prevent the provider from supplying you with superfluous services rather than services that truly meet your needs.
As this chapter steps through the process of designing an RFP for Internet training or consulting services, the discussion draws on the answers you have given to these needs assessment questions.
One of the keys to successful procurement of services is the design of the RFP (Request for Proposals). Unfortunately, most people looking for an Internet trainer or consultant never bother to create or distribute an RFP. They hear about a provider from a friend (or a friend of a friend, or from an advertisement or article), negotiate with that provider, and hire him or her. Although this informal process can work out well, if you use it you may never know whether you missed an opportunity to deal with a provider who could meet your needs better (and perhaps even less expensively) than the one you chose. For this reason, it's worth the time and effort to put together an RFP that allows you to evaluate and select from a range of choices. The number of trainers and consultants providing expert assistance on Internet topics is growing, and this growth means you have more choices and more control. Don't pass up your opportunity to negotiate the best services possible for your organization!
Preparing a good RFP doesn't have to be a difficult or onerous task. Too many people believe a good RFP has to be 50 pages long and filled with dry and technical language. In fact, some of the best RFPs are short and to the point, giving only the key information a provider needs to prepare a proposal. A thorough RFP enables the provider to do the following:
The first part of the RFP should be a brief summary of what type of proposal you are soliciting. The summary should include a very general statement of the project goals and scope, as well as some discussion of the budgetary constraints for the project. Writing this section last often makes sense, even though it appears first, because the summary should outline the information provided in more detail in the rest of the RFP. After you have filled in the details of the other sections, condensing the material into an accurate summary is easier.
After the executive summary, the RFP should contain a detailed description of your organization. This description should include the following elements:
This description enables the consultant or trainer to begin customizing a response to suit your specific needs. An appropriate presentation for a publishing firm may be completely different from a presentation to the dean of a college or university. By starting out with a description of the environment the provider will service, you contribute to the development of a proposal that clearly addresses your requirements, instead of encouraging the submission of a one-size-fits-all (or more likely, one-size-fits-none) solution.
The next critical component of the RFP is a clear statement of your project goals. The following list includes some issues to address for training:
For consulting, you should include the following issues:
You should already have the answers to these questions—from the needs assessment you did to prepare for the project. These pieces of information are the second building block in the provider's development of a proposal to meet your needs.
After the description of project goals and requirements, you should specify the constraints involved. The two most important constraints are the budget and the time frame. The provider must know the limit of funds (or range of funds) available for the project, as well as when you want the services provided. If a conflict arises in either of these areas, the provider has the option of negotiating with you for a variance in the stated constraints. However, these restrictions can help eliminate providers who are unable to offer services in your price range or during your required dates.
A helpful tip is to provide a brief outline of what material the provider should include in the RFP response, as well as an explanation of what criteria you will use to evaluate the responses. For example, do you expect a fully itemized budget as part of the cost estimate? Do you require examples of prepared materials? By specifying the format for the responses and the required supplementary materials, you accomplish two things. First, you make the response easier to prepare for the provider, which can result in a larger number of useful responses. Second, you ensure that the responses are in a standard form, making evaluation of the responses substantially easier.
In addition, providing a specific list of criteria you will use to evaluate the proposal allows the provider to focus on the aspects of the proposal most important for your needs. If the most important criteria is previous experience with similar organizations, and cost is no object, providers would be foolish to spend the bulk of their time preparing detailed cost justifications for each aspect of the proposal. On the other hand, if budget is a major factor in your decision, that item should receive more attention than other items in both the preparation and the evaluation of the proposal. In addition, carefully enumerating and weighting criteria in advance allows your organization to evaluate the proposals in an equitable manner, minimizing conflicts in the selection process.
After you have prepared an RFP, make sure that as many potential providers as possible have access to it. What providers don't know about, they can't respond to. So where are all the Internet consultants and trainers, and how can you get your RFP into their hands? The following sections describe some of the many places you can find potential providers.
A good starting place for information on suitable providers is referrals from your colleagues. By drawing on the knowledge of others in your field, you can immediately locate experienced providers doing work for similar organizations. A referral also makes the chance more likely that the provider can put together an appropriate response to your RFP, drawing on his or her experience in doing similar presentations or consultations. Remember, however, that a referral is only a starting place. The company that gave the perfect training presentation for another organization may be able to meet your needs as well, but you have no guarantee that another provider couldn't provide the same or better services, and possibly at a lower price. Make sure that you broaden the distribution of your RFP through some of the channels in the following sections.
If you already have access to the Internet (or to an electronic mail service with an Internet delivery option such as CompuServe, America Online, or MCI Mail), you can ensure that your RFP gets wide distribution by taking advantage of mailing lists on the network. You also can identify service providers through resources and materials they make available over the Internet.
Mailing lists targeted toward service providers are an excellent place to begin distributing an announcement of your RFP. In particular, the NETTRAIN mailing list for Internet trainers and the Net-Happenings mailing list for general Internet-related announcements are excellent distribution media for announcements of a training or consulting RFP. In fact, if providers aren't monitoring NETTRAIN or keeping an eye on Net-Happenings, they're likely to miss out not only on announcements of training or consulting contracts, but also on critical information about network resources and applications that they should be using in their presentations and materials. To subscribe to the Net-Happenings mailing list, send the message SUBSCRIBE NET-HAPPENINGS to majordomo@ds.internic.net. You can subscribe to NETTRAIN by sending an e-mail message containing only the line SUBSCRIBE NETTRAIN Firstname Lastname to LISTSERV@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu.
In addition to posting to mailing lists frequented by service providers, consider posting your announcement to mailing lists on topics related to your area of business—you can find mailing lists devoted to everything from education to advertising. Using this method of distribution, you can send your RFP announcement to providers who are familiar with your topics and also get additional referrals from colleagues in your field.
Another network resource that can help you locate providers of training or consulting services is the growing network of Gopher and World Wide Web servers providing information on Internet services and activities. By using a search tool like Veronica (for Gopher) or Yahoo (for the Web) to locate information on Internet training or consulting topics, you often can find references to service providers. Some of these references are in the form of announcements the providers make themselves; other references may be posted by satisfied (or dissatisfied!) customers of certain providers. For more information on Veronica, see Chapter 26, "Searching Gopherspace with Veronica." For more information on finding information on the World Wide Web, see Chapter 28, "Navigating the World Wide Web."
Although the industry has no official Internet Trainers Association or Organization of Internet Consultants, a number of Internet-related organizations exist that may be able to assist you in locating appropriate service providers. A glance through the membership directory of the Internet Society (http://info.isoc.org/), for example, is likely to yield information on a number of training and consulting providers. You also can check with professional organizations in your own field and solicit referrals from colleagues.
Professional and trade conferences can be good ways to find out about consultants and trainers offering services in your field. Service organizations may have an information booth set up as part of the conference exhibits, they may have representatives attending meetings and presentations, or they may even have representatives making presentations at the conference. Even if the people you meet at the conference cannot provide the services you need, they may be able to recommend other companies that can meet your needs. And again, you have the opportunity to ask colleagues for recommendations. Information on Internet World, one of the industry's most popular conferences, is available at http://www.mecklerweb.com/shows/internet/iwhome.htm.
As publishers discover the popularity of the Internet, many of them are beginning to publish printed directories of Internet resources and organizations. In particular, publications focusing on the business community are likely to provide directories of vendors meeting the needs of the readership. The Internet Business Review, published by Strangelove Press, already has released a directory of Internet trainers and consultants and expects to update this list regularly (it's at gopher://gopher.fonorola.net/11/Internet%20Business%20Journal). Other publishers are likely to follow this lead, so you may want to check with the publishers of Internet-related journals.
The growth in Internet publishing has led to more venues for Internet trainers and consultants to advertise their services. Although you may not see too many ads for these services in newspapers and popular magazines, journals and newsletters focusing on Internet topics are likely to draw advertisements for exactly the services you need. A quick look through recent issues of Internet-related publications may yield a number of promising candidates.
If you're looking for consultants or trainers with experience in your field, you may want to look for people who have published articles or books on topics relevant to your interests. If a consultant has written a number of articles about Internet use for a trade publication in your field, he or she already has become familiar with the issues and resources of interest to you and your colleagues. If a trainer has written about a method of training you believe may be particularly useful in your organization, you may want to send an RFP to his or her organization.
After you have sent RFPs to the many candidates found in network, print, and collegial resources, you must sort through the resulting responses to your requests for proposals. If you have done a good job of writing your RFP, this job will not be nearly as difficult as if you were starting from scratch. First of all, the proposals should follow the format laid out in the RFP, which makes comparing the proposals easier.
TIP You should consider proposals that don't follow your structure only if none of the properly prepared proposals meets your requirements; the failure to provide a proposal that meets your specifications is an indication of a provider's likely failure in giving you services that meet your specifications.
Second, you have a set of clear criteria on which to base your evaluations, making the process of reading and ranking the proposals far less ambiguous and frustrating.
Which proposal you end up selecting as the winner depends completely on how you have ranked different aspects of the RFP. If price is the most important aspect, you may be willing to accept fewer references or a sketchier outline of proposed services. If having a tailored presentation is the critical aspect, information from references and examples of materials from past presentations probably will be the deciding factors. What's important is to know before you get the proposals which aspects are most important to your decision-making and to communicate that message to your prospective service providers through the RFP.
After you have made a selection, don't expect to sit back and play a passive role as the provider services your organization. To ensure that what you receive is really what you want and need, you must actively involve yourself in the planning and provision of services. Being involved doesn't mean you should do the consultant's or trainer's work for them, but you do need to ensure that the lines of communication stay open so that no unwelcome surprises appear. Establish a regular time for the provider to talk or meet with you, and make sure that you get copies of work in progress along the way. By providing input during the entire process, you help ensure that the product you receive—whether it's a training session or a consulting report—is what you expected.
After the project is done, your job still isn't complete. A final evaluation of the services provided can help you and the trainer or consultant. If the job was well done, can you identify what aspects made it successful so that you can replicate your success in the future? If you had problems, can you identify where those problems arose so that you can prevent them from occurring in other projects?
Like your selection criteria, your final evaluation criteria is based on what aspects are most important to your organization. However, some questions to consider include the following:
Some organizations require a written summary or evaluation of services at the completion of a training or consulting project. Even if you don't do an evaluation, it's well worth taking the time to structure your thoughts about the services so that you know what you have done right and wrong; you can make future decisions with that knowledge firmly in mind.