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Case study

Requirements written so the market could answer them.

Lethbridge is the commercial, financial, transportation, and industrial centre of southern Alberta, with roughly 101,500 residents. Its fire and emergency service needed a data management system, and a way to judge what the market offered.

The brief

Vendors answer the question you ask. Most of the work is asking it precisely.

The City of Lethbridge is a mid-sized city of approximately 101,482 residents and the commercial, financial, transportation, and industrial centre of southern Alberta, with several national companies based in the region.

Its fire and emergency service needed a data management system. The risk in that procurement is not choosing badly — it is writing requirements loose enough that every vendor can claim to meet them.

Avèro structured the requirements so responses could be compared on the same basis and held to after signature.

What the work produced

The deliverables.

General system requirements

What the system must do in ordinary daily use, written from how the service actually operates rather than from a product's feature list.

Performance reporting

Requirements for reporting within the system, defined up front, because reporting is the capability most often assumed and least often specified.

Integration

What the system must connect to, stated explicitly, so integration is a contractual obligation rather than a discovery made during implementation.

Security

Security requirements set out as their own category — for an emergency service, the standard is not negotiable after the fact.

Technical

The technical constraints the system has to operate within, so an otherwise capable product is not selected into an environment it cannot run in.

Where it stands

Status and outlook.

Where it stands

Avèro delivered structured requirements across all five categories, forming the basis for evaluating vendor responses.

Why the structure matters

Requirements grouped this way can be scored. Requirements written as prose cannot, which is how procurements end in arguments about what was meant.

Next step

Thirty minutes.
No pitch.

Tell us where you are. We'll say honestly whether we can help. If we can't, we'll point you to someone who can.