Organizations waste huge amounts of time and money running projects to select between similar products from competing vendors. Attempting to be thorough, these projects typically create long Requests for Information (RFIs) or Requests for Proposal (RFPs) that ask many questions. Assessing vendor responses to RFIs or RFPs is not an efficient or reliable way to differentiate products, nor is it a good platform for negotiation.

All the Thinkers have worked both sides of the fence – for companies that have procured software and for software vendors. We use that experience to guide clients to make informed, reliable choices.

As with all our services, the essence is facilitating you through a process which ensures clarity – clarity about what you are trying to achieve and why – which in turn leads to clarity about which products and vendors will truly help your organization to make things happen.

A typical vendor selection process might follow this pattern:

• Conduct internal workshops to clarify what you aim to achieve and why
• Develop insight into both key enabling characteristics and critical limiting factors
• Develop business scenarios which will test and illustrate the key enabling characteristics
• Invite medium list vendors to write short responses to illustrate how their product will satisfy the business scenarios
• Eliminate unsatisfactory responses to leave a short list
• Adopt a simple but powerful natural-language scale to rate accurately the likelihood of achieving an outcome with a given product
• Run workshops with short-listed vendors to investigate in detail how they will enable your organization to execute the business scenarios.
  • Probe both strengths and weaknesses openly with the vendors.
  • Consider not only the product and vendor capabilities but the impact on your organization.
  • Rate the product openly with the vendor using the natural language scale. Allow them to respond to ensure that mis-understandings are eliminated.

We can guide you through this process, providing expert facilitation services for both internal and vendor-facing workshops.

Having also worked for vendors, we can also advise during negotiations - we have a record of helping our clients to save large amounts of money.