Step 5 · Run the Demo

Make vendors demonstrate your workflow and requirements instead of allowing the demonstration to follow a polished sales script.

Full guide planned · 9 min read
Step 5 · Run the Demo

The short version

You should control the demo. A vendor's standard demonstration is built to be impressive, and it is built around their strongest features rather than your hardest day. Send the requirements ahead, name the workflow you want walked through, and put the people who will actually use the system in the room. The instruction that changes the most is “show us,” not “tell us.”

See it applied

Worked example — built from published USFA sources, not from a department's reported results

Worked Case Study: The NERIS Transition Through the Technology Adoption Roadmap

Every fire department reporting incident data had to move from NFIRS to NERIS on a national timetable. The destination was fixed; almost everything else was still a local decision. This works the twelve steps through that transition, using published U.S. Fire Administration material for the facts and clearly labelled examples for everything a department would do locally.

Read it

Go deeper

Questions to ask your vendor

  1. Show us how this solves our actual use case.
  2. Show us what the end user sees.
  3. Show us what the administrator sees.
  4. Show us how information gets into the system.
  5. Show us how information gets out.
  6. Show us the integration rather than telling us it integrates.
  7. Show us what happens when connectivity is lost.
  8. Show us the reports we identified in our requirements.
  9. Show us what requires additional licensing.

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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