subject: Top Tips to Defining the Functional Requirements of an ITSM Tool [print this page] Top Tips to Defining the Functional Requirements of an ITSM Tool
When looking to purchase an ITSM tool, it is important to define the functional requirements. These questions can be re-used when the short-listed vendors are requested to demonstrate their solution capability against your defined requirement and their supplied responses.
When gathering your requirements and preparing your questions, it is important not to be too broad or too specific.
FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENT EXAMPLES:
1. During busy periods it is often difficult to keep customers and support staff updated - describe what features your solution provides to address this problem.
2. To improve first line resolution rates, we need to ensure that identified solutions and workarounds are available to both support staff and customers - describe what features your solution provides to address this problem.
3. Providing quality management information is currently time consuming and difficult - describe what features your solution provides to address this, including examples of useful reports, specifically including staff resource utilisation.
4. We have a large number of technical changes and routine tasks which have to be performed by specific teams and done in a specific order - describe what features your solution provides to create, manage, schedule and report on these activities, along with the resource commitment.
5. We have to manage internal and external service agreements with customers and 3rd parties. This includes regular monitoring and performance reviews - describe in detail what features and techniques your solution provides to support and enhance our capability in this area.
6. We have a wide range of computer equipment, software and maintenance contracts to manage. The management is currently done using spread-sheets; reporting is limited and time consuming - describe in detail what features and techniques your solution provides to support and enhance our capability in this area and support change risk assessment . A graphical representation is desirable.
7. We intend to adopt industry best practice based on ITIL and later formal standards such as ISO/IEC 20000, we also have clear IT governance requirements - describe how both your solution and services will help us achieve our goal along with the supporting evidence. NOTE: 3rd party accreditations such as Pink Verify are not an endorsement of ITIL compliance).
In summary, if you are too broad e.g. - "We need reporting" then it will be very hard for a company to understand your requirements. If you are too specific - "We need a daily incident report, detailing customer impact, priority specialist, with totals" then you may never find such a tool or incur higher costs to customise a tool that meets your needs exactly. An example of a definition that is just right - "We need feature rich, easy to use, reporting that has a range of standard reports and advanced selection and sorting criteria. Output should be available in textual and graphical forms". This will give you and any prospective companies you are giving the functional requirements to a clear view on the type of software tool you require.
