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    • Action plan

    Step 3 – Creating your shopping list

    Medium effort

    Medium impact

    It’s now time to drill down into detail on your requirements and start exploring potential suppliers. Knowing what features and functionality you’re looking for will help you filter out products and suppliers more effectively – and get to a good shortlist more quickly. It also helps to gather your thoughts before you speak to salespeople.

    After completing this action plan, you should have clearly defined your requirements and have potentially narrowed down a solution(s) and/or supplier(s).

    The first step of creating your shopping list is to use our features checklist – a series of questions that can help you identify exactly the right software for you. You’ll see that these questions are not all about technology - they’re designed to help you understand your business requirements, so you know exactly how your software will fit in.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline
    What's involved? Ways to use this action plan Measuring impact
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    What can I do with this Action Plan?

    Start this Action Plan

    Add some extra information to this plan and we’ll help you get it done.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline

    Download and print

    Get a printable template for this Action Plan, fill it in with some target dates, and share it with your team. Pin it on the wall where everyone can see it.

    Get the printable Action Plan

    Learning Groups

    We also run Learning Groups on these topics where you can join other leaders tackling the same challenges.

    Find a Learning Group

    How will I know if my action plan is working?

    Defined set of requirements

    Your clearly defined service requirements will have potentially narrowed down a solution(s) and/or supplier(s)

    Why this metric?

    With lots of services and options out there, it's important to be able to narrow down your options so that focused conversations can be had.

    How do I use this going forward?

    Your features checklist will be another important document, full of personalised information about your business, that will be vital for buying with confidence.