What Suppliers Need to Know About Your Requirements

Having a clear understanding of your needs is important if a supplier is going to be able to offer the best solution for you. There are many different solutions for many different types of needs/problems or budgets.

This is a list of some of the key questions that a good supplier will be looking to get answers to so that they can understand your needs. You are unlikely to be able to answer all of them definitively especially if you are in the early stages of the process. However the more information you can provide now the better the quality of the responses you can expect to receive.

Overview
What is the purpose or goal of your project? What is the problem you are looking to solve?

What stage are you at with your planning or procurement process? Are you looking for a single, short term or specific solution, or help with a longer term or more widespread training strategy?

Have you done any e-learning before? Do you have any existing e-learning infrastructure or software that you want to build upon, integrate with, or replace?

Are you looking for enabling technologies, content or a mixture of both? Enabling technologies are things like Learning Management Systems, Community Building and Authoring tools – any systems that you might want to use to develop and/or deliver training solutions.

Content is courses, knowledge bases, and expertise that is transferred to your audiences.

Content
If you are looking for courses – either published or bespoke, what is the subject matter, or range of subjects? Are there particular learning objectives that need to be met? Are there any legal/compliance requirements that apply? Do you have in-house subject matter experts, or do you want your supplier to be the subject expert?

What can you say about the target audience? Are they employees, customers? What prior knowledge do they have? What is the size of the audience? Are they geographically dispersed?

Do you have particular deadlines to meet? Are these dependent on other events/decisions within the organisation? What is the expected life span of the course material or project? Will the training need to be delivered to the audience at the same time, in a series of events, or will it be available over a period of time? Will there be a requirement for tutor or expert support? Will you be using your own expertise or do you want services for this as well?

Technologies
Will you want any systems hosted on your own network, or externally? If your own network, what technologies do you use? Will your IT team be involved in the decision making process?

What are the most important features you need in a system? What are the nice to haves?

Budget
Do you have a particular budget, or are you exploring the possibilities? A ball park or range of figures will generally be sufficient to know whether certain options are available to you or not. You could have a solution for £5,000, £50,000, or £500,000 but they will be very different solutions.