Check out parts 1 and 2 of this series, Identify Your Key Stakeholders and Define Your Results. Once you have started the vendor evaluation, appropriate documentation keeps the process on track. While this may sound simple, the large volume of information you’ll be collecting can make it difficult to keep track of your priorities along the way.

Check out part 1 of this 3 part series, Identify Your Key Stakeholders. Now that you have identified your stakeholders and curated a set of their requirements, you’ll need to set the expectations of what the ideal vendor partner should provide. In short, before you make the first official contact with a potential vendor, you should also know the results you expect from your interactions with the vendors and how you will structure the evaluation to achieve them. Consider the following:

  The evaluation of a new vendor requires a great deal of planning to avoid getting lost in the process or bogged down in conflicting requirements and bureaucracy. A mismanaged evaluation or, worse, the selection of the wrong vendor, can have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences, potentially disrupting productivity, wasting time, resources, and money in an effort to make a bad solution better, and even resulting in political fallout for the team responsible for the decision.  So, how do you avoid making the wrong choice? Before you even begin to reach out to prospective vendors, you’ll want to make sure that you have identified all the key stakeholders within your organization who will be impacted by the addition of a new product or vendor and assessed all of their requirements and preferences. When building your evaluation team, include stakeholders who are directly impacted by a new product, like end users and their...