Vendor Application Software Evaluation & Selection Playbook

Make smarter software decisions faster with our Vendor Software Selection Guide. This comprehensive guide provides 100+ customizable templates, content guides, and digital assets designed to streamline your vendor selection process.

One example is the Chart Momentum Matrix, a customer experience framework that helps your team assess if existing vendor customers are experiencing service improvements. The Momentum Matrix also generates a Momentum Score, directly measuring the proportion of satisfied customers and those seeing improvements.

What the Vendor Software Selection Guide Offers

The Playbook is your essential tool to jumpstart your vendor software decision process:

Playbook Structure

 Preparation

Four essential actions to take before starting your project to focus the scope, enhance impact, and save significant time--Prepare with AI to boost productivity and achieve substantial business benefits. Prepare an application map to clarify your requirements and define the project scope. Prepare a context diagram to expand your understanding of the application’s scope, boundaries, and dependencies while also helping to mitigate risks. Prepare an opportunity brief to increase organizational alignment on resource allocation (including people, time, CAPEX/OPEX), project scope, approach, expected outcomes, and overall benefits.By following these steps, you can set a strong foundation for your project.

 Initiation

Prepare your project for success by defining its mission, organization, milestones, guiding principles, draft scoring methods, and management processes.

 Diligence

Research vendor software, focusing on your vital needs. Network with peer organizations and customers of target vendors to measure their satisfaction. Finalize vendor minimums, evaluation processes, question design, and scoring methods. Narrow your vendor pool to the most viable solutions.

 Scoring Process

Enter your scoring basis, decision factors and weights, question weights, and question scoring scale into a robust scoring model.

 Solution Needs Brief-RFP

Collaborate with your Procurement team to create a comprehensive Brief or Request for Proposal (RFP). Develop questionnaires to gather essential vendor information, including technical, infrastructure, and security capabilities, vendor and third party profiles, vital solution needs, and total cost of ownership including one-time and recurring solution costs.

 Evaluation & Selection

Prepare and conduct agile evaluation and negotiation summits for each vendor. Alternatively, you can follow a more traditional evaluation process by stage, encompassing proposal reviews, interview-demos, customer references, sandbox demos, field visits, final recommendations, and  negotiations.

 Resources

Leverage AI, advanced search criteria, digital assets, and other methods and techniques to accelerate your project outcomes.

Playbook Table of Contents

Use the Manage Project Board worksheet in the Playbook to plan and manage your vendor software evaluation and selection project.

Learn About Playbook Features

The Vendor Application Software Evaluation & Selection Playbook, created by Prosultant.com, Inc., is considered copyrighted works under the United States and other copyright laws and is the property of Prosultant.com, Inc.

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