A very important part of the ISPL request for proposal is the elaboration on the supplier evaluation approach.
The use of a strategy that really fits the situation ISPL provides the user with a really extensive risk management process.
Based on best practices, it helps the management to design a delivery strategy that really fits the situation of both the customer and the supplier organizations.
This is a benefit for both the customer and the supplier organizations because selecting a suboptimal strategy obviously brings along higher costs.
ISPL is developed and published in 1999 by a consortium of five European companies: EXIN and ID Research (ORDINA) from the Netherlands, FAST from Germany, SEMA from France and TIEKE from Finland.
This model can be used to easily link and compare ISPL to other Information Technology methods and frameworks.
This chapter provides a high-level description of the ISPL acquisition process from a customer-supplier-interaction point-of-view.
Make RFP To construct a request for proposal the customer first needs to describe the acquisition goal and other requirements, and perform a situation and risk analysis.
The result of this step is a sufficiently clear understanding of the requirements to the systems and services that are the goal of the acquisition and the costs and benefits for the business and its various stakeholders.
The procurement step of the ISPL acquisition process embodies the obtaining of one single contract.
The procurement step consists of three sequencing processes: The aim of the tendering process is to select a supplier and a proposal for the considered services and systems and to agree with the chosen supplier on a contract in which both parties’ deliveries and responsibilities are defined.
The aim of this process is to ensure that all outstanding technical and commercial requirements in the procurement contract (that was written and signed in the tendering phase) have been met.
When one or more contracts are not completed or the acquisition goal is not reached this decision requires the involvement of the customer company's organizational authorities.
By describing and analyzing the situation, critical risks can be identified and mitigated by selecting actions and an appropriate strategy.
ISPL provides heuristics that link risks and situational factors to mitigating actions and strategies.
ISPL provides the user with two separate sets of guidelines There are two steps in describing an ongoing service.
ISPL proposes two methods for identifying the type of service: These methods can be used in a successive way where the ISO-LCP standard is used to identify the different process types and public domain service packages are used to refine the ISO-LCP processes.
Secondary, an assessment has to be made on which already present descriptions of future operational items are relevant to use in the project.
The client has to describe the profiles of the documentation needed for maintenance on, and further development of the Information service.
The situation of both the customer and supplier organizations has a lot of influence in the success of the Information Service acquisition process.
A situational factor value says something about the relative contribution to the overall complexity or uncertainty of the service to be delivered.
The ISPL method provides a set of tables which aids the user in determining the situational factor values.
The resulting service delivery strategy consists of three elements: ISPL provides heuristics on how to mitigate risks and change the individual situational factors that cause them.
For example, ISPL advises to use an evolutionary construction and installation approach when both overall complexity and uncertainty are high.
In total there are six types of control: development, quality and configuration in a formal and frequent variant.
ISPL provides heuristics on what basic sequences should be used for different delivery strategy options.
The basic sequence found is adapted to the list of actions to mitigate risks of the #Delivery strategy design.
Its results can serve as input for the #Situation and risk analysis phase of service planning if necessary.
ISPL provides the tables of content of each of the decision point deliverable types and subtypes.
ISPL gives guidance on which information should be included for each property that is described in the service report.