Related guide · Making the Case: ROI a Council Will Accept
How to present the cost and benefit of a technology purchase to the people who approve it, in terms they already use.
The short version
A council is not evaluating the technology. They are deciding whether this is a better use of public money than the other things in front of them, and they will ask questions about cost, risk and what happens if they say no. Bring the operational problem, the baseline you measured, the total cost across its life rather than the first year, and an honest account of what the department will stop doing or do differently as a result. Numbers you can defend beat numbers that look impressive.
Questions to ask your vendor
- What is the problem, in terms a non-firefighter understands?
- What is it costing us now, in time, risk or money?
- What is the total cost across five years, not the first?
- What happens operationally if we do nothing?
- What will we measure afterwards to show whether it worked?
- What are the alternatives we considered and rejected, and why?
This is a reading list, not a guide
Everything above was published by someone else, and is here because it is the clearest treatment of the subject we could find and verify. The Hub’s own guide to this topic is still being written. If you know a better source than the ones listed, that is worth telling us before it is.
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