I worked in one of the biggest funding organization in India for 4+ years. The organization has 90+ team members with 6 different verticals. Each of these verticals require team members with different competencies and technical skills.
For Example: A program team member is expected to travel to field location, document the findings and build a presentation. Whereas, data team member is expected to have an oversight on real time information and build dashboards as per the need (A third party platform). Similarly, there are different deliverables across other verticals.
Few months ago, I moved out of the organization and started working independently with smaller organizations. I have noticed a similar expectations of various skill sets is required for team members, same as the large organization (There wont be any verticals because of the smaller team size).
A similarity irrespective of the size of an organization for basic and technical skills makes selection of a right laptop for different roles critical.
So, I would like to know - How do I go about deciding which laptop to buy for different roles?
This problem is something most institutions and organizations face at some point, especially during the early stages or when there are a lot of people performing different job responsibilities that would require different technologies to perform their day-to-day tasks.
The example you highlighted above is a good scenario to consider. For the first use case, you mentioned that a program team member has to travel to the field and perform some tasks such as documentation and making presentations to show to stakeholders. These tasks wouldn’t require a high processing power but would instead prioritize better battery life (An ultrabook). Similarly, the team member who is expected to perform data analytics-based tasks and build dashboards, etc. would require a machine with higher memory specifications (RAM) and significantly higher processing power but wouldn’t require a maxed-out video memory (VRAM) in most cases.
Choosing the ideal laptop and system specifications hence would become a daunting task and that along with the myriad of options available out there in the market makes it a long time-consuming affair. Hence, we at T4G have come up with the following Laptop framework we have used internally in our organization for our team members. The framework includes both minimum and recommended specifications for machines as per the use cases.
Hope you find this helpful!! Do let me know if you have any questions or suggestions
Thanks Kenny. Super useful. If you could update your post with a link to a read only version of the Google Sheet which forum users can make a copy of and adjust to their needs. that would be great.
