LMS Milestone - shortlisting

The LMS Evaluation Team reached a major milestone in the project last week. 

Having spent several weeks reading and scoring the vendor responses the group met to share their scores and to reach a consensus score for each response.  The group also then used these scores to shortlist vendors for the next stage of the project. 

The outcome of this process is that a number of vendors have been invited to provide a demonstration of their proposed solution.  These demonstrations have been booked, and will be complete by 10 June.  So there will be considerable excitement and the need to coordinate a number of vendors and approximately 90 people from libraries involved in attending sessions over the next couple of weeks.

These presentation will include a general overview of each company’s proposed solution as well as detailed sessions which will allow the SMEs to drill down into the details of how various parts of the LMS works.  To this end the SMEs have developed some scenarios that have been provided to the vendors.  The vendors will need to demonstrate how their solution can undertake the details of the scenarios written by the SMEs.  There will also be opportunities for further questions and clarification. 

Once 10 June has passed the SMEs will be providing a detailed report to the Evaluation Team regarding their view as to the relative capacity of the systems being scrutinised.  The SME’s reports, along with the Evaluation Team’s own assessment will then be used to further shortlist the vendors.

The next stage will be to ask the preferred vendor, or perhaps 2 vendors to provide a test system which will simulate the complexity of our consortium for hands on testing.  This will allow the SME groups to have considerable “hands on” time utilising the preferred system to confirm its capabilities and possible shortcomings.  It should be noted that if there are two proposed solutions which appear to be of almost equal value and technical capacity we have option of asking both vendors to provide us with a test system to work on.

At this stage it is anticipated that the hands on testing will be completed by the end of July.

While these various parts of the project are running the Evaluation Team is also busy doing value for money assessments and will be undertaking referee checks and several other activities to ensure that the project keeps on track.

I’ll provide you with further information once we have passed the “presentations” milestone.