How to Choose a Vendor for your IT Project – For Business Analysts

As a business analyst you may have the opportunity to help choose vendors for your projects. This can be a daunting task because choosing the wrong vendor will be an expensive lesson that costs time and budget.

Often you will not be alone in making the decision and in most scenarios, the business analyst simply provides the information that guides the decision and the ultimate decision is usually made by someone above you. That said, you still want to provide the best options to choose from.

Here are the first things I do when faced with finding a vendor even when the exact scope of the project has not yet been completely defined:

 

1. Define the project goals

Before you even start looking at vendors, get as much detail as possible on what is to be done. This will make sure you know what you want before you engage vendors. You can do this by looking at a scope document if one is available or from high level requirements documents, if one is available .

2. Create a Request for Information Document

This is a document that will help itemize all the details that are important for your project to the best of your ability. This will also help guide your discussion with the vendors to uncover if they can provide all that you will need.

3. Research potential vendors

The internet makes everything easier as now you can simple navigate to the vendor’s website to find out about what they offer. You can also find vendors from reading industry magazines and reports that keep up with these vendors. Gartner and Forrester are two such reports that can help find vendors.

4. Contact the top 5 in your list.

Narrow down your research to the top 5 then make contact with them. You can make this contact by  filling out the contact form on their website, requesting a demo online, emailing or calling them directly with RFP or RFI as well.

Depending on your company, you may determine how much you want to disclose to the vendor. Check with your managers to make sure you divulge the appropriate level of information before contact.

5. Setup a demo/conference call

The purpose of the call is to talk about the items that were probably not discussed in the communication so far. Also you want to put a voice or face to the person you have been dealing with and give them a chance to show you their product or service. The call also helps uncover information that you may not have known and is the first step in establishing a relationship between yourselves and a potential vendor.

6.  Get price estimates.

Pricing tends to be the last thing that vendors want to discuss. This is because they want to make sure they know the scope of your project very well before locking themselves in with a price. However sometimes they can give you a generic pricing and a rate for additional work if that ever becomes necessary. Even if they can’t give you an exact figure, get at least a baseline pricing because the decision makers will definitely want to know.

7. Present to planning team/ schedule second demo

By this time based on all the information you have gathered so far you can compile the information and present to the planning team/ project team. There may be the need for scheduling a second demo  with a sample of all the stakeholders who will weigh in on the decision as well.

8. Facilitate the Decision

The decision process may differ from organizations to organization. I have worked in environments where the executives are the only ones who decide. Other organizations are more democratic and  teams vote and that’s how the decision is made. Regardless of the the format of you organization, by now you should be able to make a decision.

Bonus: What to do if there is a tie?

If for some reason all the vendors seem viable and there isn’t any real difference between them or there is a trade-off that makes the decision difficult, then how do you decide? Well, one trick you can use is to pit them against each other.

You can tell each vendor who the other vendors they are competing against are and ask them why you should choose them over their competitor. Hopefully they can reveal things about each other that you did not consider before and that will help guide the decision.