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The Software Selection Process:
The Pre-Solicitation Phase
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Starting the Software Selection Process
The first stage of the successful software selection process is also the most
critical. The methodology for the pre-solicitation phase sounds simple
enough—you express your needs, and translate them into requirements:
Doing Your Homework
It might be tedious and time-consuming, you’re thinking,
but manageable in the end. However, there are dangers, even here. And at this stage,
if there aren’t any questions keeping you awake at nights, there should be.
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Have all organizational
requirements been expressed?
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Have organizational requirements
been expressed accurately?
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Do these requirements translate
into good business practices? (You don’t want to end up doing the wrong
thing faster.) If the question hasn’t been asked before, now is
certainly the time.
Well, hey, that last one’s out of scope, you might say. Not
my department.
But don’t forget that buy-in from all levels of the
organization is necessary to make the project a success.
If senior management doesn’t buy in, you may not have the
backing you need to make the difficult decisions all major projects inevitably
require. And that can translate into an incapacitating lack of room to maneuver.
At the worst, well, chopping blocks are probably not your first choice in
furniture.
And it’s even worse if you don’t have buy-in from the
prospective users on the front line. They ain’t gonna use what they don’t want
to use. Especially if they feel it’s been foisted on them by a team who doesn’t
understand their needs. A blunt truth: organizational politics are ugly at the
best of times, but they can be career-killers when real grievances are at issue.
You might also be wondering if it’s possible to over-express
requirements. There’s such a thing as getting bogged down in details, after all.
But even a minor oversight or inaccuracy can translate into
an unclear requirement, which in turn can translate into a fatally flawed
selection which will sink your organization, or at the least tie it up in years
of wrangling, committing it to spending huge sums of money it should never have
had to spend in the first place.
And above all, remember that it is also a good idea to take
advantage of the wealth of information gleaned from the successes—and
failures—of companies operating in your sector.
RFP templates can be invaluable for this reason.
The Essential Criteria for Pre-solicitation
In order to allow a deep and
exhaustive evaluation of vendor offerings, the pre-solicitation phase formalizes
your problem as a knowledge base, also called a decision model or
decision tree, which is a hierarchy of criteria directly inferred from
the expression of your needs. This decision hierarchy covers the following
common but important sections for the final decision, related to both company
and product:
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functions and features
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technology
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costs
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services
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viability
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vision
Once these elements have been organized into a coherent document, you will be
in possession of a powerful decision-making tool, and well on your way to making
the right software selection decision.
Need more help getting started? Get your free
RFP Toolkit (2008 edition) now. Or download
free RFP template samples from Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC).
