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7.4 PRE-ACQUISITION PHASE

For this phase the basic questions in our decision tree revolve around the
following:

• What is our goal?
• What will the system do, who will use it, where will it be placed, and what
services will it provide and to whom?
• Who will manage the project?
• Who will assist them, including consultants?
• Where, how, and when will we get funding?
• In what fiscal years will we be purchasing the system?
• Is funding available for travel to vendor sites and for consultants?
• What are the out-year costs of ownership and can we afford them?
• What is our acquisition strategy?
• Sole source or competition?

Obviously, the pre-acquisition phase questions and answers are very dependent
on agency policy, procurement and privacy laws, and overall priorities and
strategies. The key stakeholders include contracts, finance, management,
policy, users, legal, specialists, and the vendors. The state-of-the-art approach is
to gather the key stakeholders in a conference room for a few days and go
through the decision tree questions, explaining each one based on the response
of the audience. Details on how this can be done productively are presented
later in this chapter. Note that this chapter does not provide a complete deci-
sion tree family of questions but rather shows how to build and apply one that
is appropriate to your activity.
Pre-acquisition documents include a concept of operations (ConOps) and
an acquisition strategy. The next two sections address these documents.

7.4.1 CONCEPT OF OPERATIONS DOCUMENT

Before any significant steps can be taken in the development of the AFIS
project, the project development team should prepare a detailed concept of
operations (ConOps) document. The ConOps is a statement of why the system
is needed, providing a general description of how it is expected to work, who
will use it, and when it will be installed.
If armed with the right questions and tools, a ConOps can be written in 3
days. Starting with an outline and a white board connected to a computer, a
facilitator can solicit high-level ideas for each ConOps topical area, capture
them on the board, and later that same day convert them to Keynote ™ or
™
PowerPoint slides. On the second day, the team can review the slides and see