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You are the IT manager of a medium size company and you have been asked to arrange the upgrade of the network. You are still pretty green around the gills and you need to know where to start and what do you do.
Are you expected to purchase and install the equipment yourself? Or are you going to create a Request For Proposal (RFP) which will be offered out to venders for tender.
The answers to these questions are not straightforward. It all depends on the resources of your department. The following points in this document are designed to point you in the right direction and to highlight some pitfalls. There have been whole books written on this subject so this short text should only be used as an insight to this scenario.
Understanding what the business requires before you start ordering equipment.Find out the answers to the following questions and consider the following points.
How many computers are required?
A logical first step. Get a rough idea of all the equipment that will be required. I say rough because there will be many factors which will change this initial figure. Some of which are highlighted in the list below.
How many users will be interacting with the network?
Will the company have part time employees or be engaged in shift work? Does the company work around the clock? In these situations the computers will be shared between employees and the mean time between failure will rise.
Identify the maximum load the network will be subjected to.
The hardware and the network should not be run above 60% of it peck performance. Loads in excess of this will start to cause problems. Measuring hardware loads is possibly easier to comprehend. The percentage of hard drive space used or the available RAM present after the required applications have been opened, can both be easily viewed within the users operating system. Measuring the load on the network requires network tools such as a Data traffic analyzer. This will measure the number of collisions and the amount of data being carried by the network.
What are the technical requirements.
Understand how technically advanced the equipment needs to be?
Does the business require state of the art equipment. Certain companies in the areas of multimedia, financial trading and graphical design may require state of the art technology but your average administration department does not.
What are the staff preferences?
Being realistic by practically upgrading the helpdesk hardware and re-distributing this old hardware to the administration dept to replace their even older computers may make economical and logical sense but it can cause tension between the staff. Departments should be made aware of such decisions and their feeling taken into account.
What are the management preferences?
Managers are generally power animals. They will request the best equipment and demand priority solely to increase the impression given out to other departments. Does the sales department need the latest and greatest hardware? Probably not, but as they see themselves as the group which brings the money into the company, they will expect the best.
Differentiate between the needs and the wants of the client.
There is a difference between providing the company with the technology they need to meet their obligations and providing them with what they want. They will need to be made aware of these differences. Individuals may want a CD burner but do the need a CD burner.
What needs to go in a Request For Proposal?
All of the information that has been gleamed for the points above will be useful. You will have to be very particular regarding your requirements. Listing the hardware components simply as a 10Gb harddrive and 128Mb of RAM would not be sufficient. You leave yourself open to the possibility of receiving a IDE drive when you need a SCSI drive and the 128 Mb of RAM may run at 64Hz when you require 100Hz.
You will have to decide if you are going to specify brand names. Doing so may leave you open to law suits if you are working for a government department, as this may be viewed as discriminatory behaviour. Companies do get around this though by specifying the exact hardware requirements of a brand with out naming the brand themselves.
You can set up a criteria that the venders have to meet to weed out any undesirable companies. The criteria could include…..
Minimum number of full time engineers employed
Number of years in business
The location of the vender to the business
Its response time
Remember to be particular with your details. I’ve heard a story where the IT manager did not specify that he required new equipment and as a result he got a tender based on used hardware. Another example is the IT manager who did specify that the equipment was to be new but he did not specify how resent the components had to be. He had no end of problems trying to get replacement parts when he had problems.
