If you got excited and forgot or missed any of these items, you have put yourself and the security director at risk of being embarrassed or maybe even fired. Let’s think about what you need to do to ensure this doesn’t happen. Take a tip from Boxerbaum and Smith, the voices of experience, and make sure you have the right team with the right skillsets for designing, selling and implementing your solutions.

This means having your design team qualified to work with IT and network-centric solutions, while engaging the customer’s IT department early and often in the planning process. And your selling team must be able to identify the business benefits of their enabling technology solutions. Finally and arguably most importantly, the project manager should be experienced in both the physical and IT aspects of the project. Above all, establish and manage reasonable expectations from the start. Overpromising your or the system’s true capabilities is a recipe for disaster for everyone involved.

One last health-care market trend worth noting is a more professional RFP and RFQ process. In the past, security directors steered business to their trusted supplier. This was not a problem for conventional physical security projects. The supplier delivered these systems from a turnkey perspective … piece of cake! But today converged network infrastructure and wireless technologies have dramatically changed the rules of the game. A strong, well-planned RFP en
sures expectations are met by all stakeholders on a health-care project.  

Paul Boucherle, Certified Protection Professional (CPP) and Certified Sherpa Coach (CSC), is principal of Canfield, Ohio-based Matterhorn Consulting. He has more than 30 years of diverse security and safety industry experience.

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