Technology Advisory & Systems Engineering for Cities & Towns
Technology Advisory for Cities and Towns
Independent help specifying, buying, and overseeing the systems a city will live with for a decade.
A city replaces its permitting system, its utility billing system, or its ERP once every ten or fifteen years. The vendor's team has done it fifty times; the city's team is doing it once. That asymmetry, more than any technical factor, determines how the project goes.
What these projects look like
- A platform replacement driven by end of support, a failed upgrade, or a service problem
- A selection process run by purchasing staff who are not technologists
- Vendor demonstrations designed to show strengths rather than answer the city's questions
- An implementation contract whose acceptance terms decide who pays when things slip
- Data migration from a system whose business rules were never documented
Where HQT helps
- Requirements that are specific and testable, developed with the departments who will use the system
- Solicitation content, evaluation criteria, scoring guides, and demonstration scripts using the city's own scenarios
- Contract exhibits: service levels, acceptance criteria, data ownership and export, accessibility, and security terms
- Owner's technical representative services during implementation: deliverable review, risk tracking, change request analysis, and migration validation
- Independent go-live readiness assessment before the city commits
- Post-implementation review and a plan for the capabilities that were deferred
How an engagement usually starts
A city asks for help writing an RFP, or calls partway through a troubled implementation. HQT does not resell the platforms it helps evaluate and does not bid on solicitations it helped write, and that independence is stated in the engagement agreement.