The Art of Effective POC – Part 1 (Pre-POC)

Today technologies are playing most important role in meeting strategic business objectives. Over the period of last 5 to 10 years, there is a significant increase in IT & Security budget. Technologies are now considering for NEW BUSINESS INITIATIVES by organization’s management. Today most of the organizations are heavily dependant on technology.

Wrong selection of technology might lead to significant negative impact on strategic business objectives.

Q: How to select RIGHT TECHNOLOGY or PRODUT?

A: Effective POC (Proof of Concept)

Q: What if POC?

A: Testing procedure to ensure whether Technology/Product is suitable for particular business environment.

I would not say, effective POC needs long duration, rather I would say effective POC MUST follow certain steps as mention below.

Sr	Phase	Steps
1	Pre POC	Identify business requirement and its weightage Multiple products & feature analysis Organization’s budget Vs Cost Product in Architecture
2	During POC	Test users Test scenario Simulate test scenario in
3	Post POC	Evaluate weightage score Walk through to CISO Risk communication Decision

This Blog’s focus on Pre POC, I will post blog on phase 2 and phase 3 as well in coming days.

Identify business requirement and its weightage:

Needless to say, one must decide destination prior to start journey. Effective requirement gathering helps decision maker to make decision without any stress. Hear I have given an approach that helps an organization to evaluate POC result in qualitative manner once POC is completed. Requirements with higher weightage / CRITICAL and HIGH category cannot be compromised. Product MUST meet business requirement of such requirements.

Organization may choose any one of two method, weightage or category.

Sr.	Requirement	Weightage	Category
1	Requirement 1	30%	CRITICAL
2	Requirement 2	20%	HIGH
3	Requirement 3	15%	MEDIUM
4	Requirement 4	10%	MEDIUM
5	Requirement 5	10%	MEDIUM
6	Requirement 6	10%	MEDIUM
7	Requirement 7	5%	LOW
TOTAL		100%

Multiple products & feature analysis (preferably 2 or more for POC)

Never consider SINGLE product for POC. Now a days all companies are designing product with lots of features which are not only meeting business requirement but are quite user friendly and with lots of add-ons, I would say value added features. Each product vendor has its own fact sheet or comparison sheet with its competitor.   

Budget Vs Cost

It is good to refer your budget and product cost. You may not want to spend time in POC if cost is higher than budget. It is very important to consider various cost e.g. Capex, Opex, Yearly support, license cost, type of license, hardware cost etc. It is always ideal to prepare Capex and Opex cost summary for 3 years.

Sr	Description	Capex	Opex	Remarks
1	Year 1
	Hardware (3 server)	2,00,000	50,000
	Product license for 100 users (100*5000)	5,00,000	-
	Installation	1,00,000
2	Year 2
	Yearly support		2,00,000
3	Year 3
	Yearly Support		2,00,000
Total		8,00,000	4,50,000

Capex: Capital expense, for betterment for business

Opex: Operating expense, occurs every year

Negotiate hard and make sure that you includes all including training to IT team and users etc.

Architecture

Prepare high level network architecture diagram. Identify where product is going to seat in network, how data or request is going to flow, understand relationship with other network components and analyze the impact.

With this you are all most DONE with Pre POC preparation.

I shall also share COMPLETE POC TEMPLATE IN XLS format in "Post POC (Phase 3)" blog.

Hope this would be helpful to all.