Recently, the term Vendor selection process has been popping up a lot lately over the Google search engine. And when you try delving into its details, it turns out to be an extremely complex, daunting, tiresome and emotional undertaking. Though I am not scaring you, that’s a fact, especially for those who have no idea how to approach it or those who are doing it for the very first time.
Fret not, there are several software outsourcing companies that first understand your technical and business requirements and then ensure to conduct a successful vendor selection process. However, you can also read away the following post as this turns out to be a sure-shot guide to save time, money and reduce stress, especially when working with an evaluation team for conducting a vendor selection process.
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Vendor selection process – The Why Part
If you have ever achieved success at some point in life, you will surely understand that success is not about one person. It’s always the group effort whether you have been ranked at the first place in school or conducted a project right in context to the client’s technical and business requirements. Do you remember the time when you were a kid, and your teachers or professors or mentors were available for you round the clock? Similarly, while you were working on a software development project, you won’t be doing all things by yourself. You will need a team of the best developers around and that’s why you need to be very careful when conducting the vendor selection process. As one wrong decision can take your entire project down. Not to mention that ignoring the vendor selection process can result in more expensive issues in the long run.
Now you must be wondering what happens if the vendor selection process fails or the chosen evaluation team doesn’t reach the end goal within a determined time period? Well, first you need to know if the product developed is not excellent it means it has failed and secondly if you aren’t offered exceptional support for your products it means the project hasn’t succeeded. In simple words, vendor selection is more like choosing a babysitter. You cannot make a random choice. You must evaluate certain aspects in advance before making a decision.
Key Aspects When Conducting Particular Vendor Selection Process
Of course, conducting the vendor selection phase is not an easy task but by taking these steps and aspects into consideration, nothing can stop you from choosing the right potential vendor.
#1 Gather all the Technical and business requirements
Of course, vendor requirements assign importance, especially among the vendor selection criteria. One of the many ways of choosing the right vendor is by providing an executive summary business overview. In fact, before you start looking for relevant candidates, just see whether you are well acquainted with your company goal or not, where you want your business to reach in the upcoming years, how much of your work would you like to give to your outsource provider, have you decided on the budget yet?
To be precise with your existing requirements is the best way to succeed. So what can be done? Do all the background detailed specifications assumptions in advance. After that, evaluate the customer needs, consider their core requirements and see what you must do to make your development project a huge success. Apart from these business requirements, deciding on the budget is very important at this particular stage. In addition, have you realized at present early app releases could give you a competitive edge? This also means that defining deadlines in advance must also be considered as a part of business requirements.
#2 Evaluate the Candidates
The next thing to take into consideration is evaluating the relevant candidates. After knowing the project specifications, now it’s time to look around for potential candidates. You see once you know what exactly you need, you will start looking for relevant software development companies accordingly. In fact, at this point, you will come across a dozen names so it becomes very important to choose the relevant one.
You can check Google, of course, that should be the most obvious thing to do but apart from this, I would consider looking around for referrals and recommendations. Customer reviews, employee feedback, references – these factors must be taken into consideration when looking for a relevant development company.
Test the Candidate
Once you start the hunt, it’s time to contact the companies and evaluate them on different criteria such as:
- Experience – One of the core aspects is the experience of the company. Many business owners prefer price over these factors but I would strongly recommend considering the experience of the development company even before the price. As mentioned earlier, you will come across a wide range of development companies carrying different levels of experience and expertise. Now, why am I focusing more on experience, instead of expertise is that you know they have already delivered successful projects and have hands-on experience. So the chances of these people getting stuck in between are pretty low. Check out some tech sites such as Clutch, Upwork, Glassdoor, and even social media apps such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Qualifications and Expertise – Apart from experience comes expertise. Once you know the business requirements, you know exactly how your developer is supposed to be and what technology stack must he or she be specialized in. Here to ease your work, what can be done is create a list of vendors specializing in their interests and then test them or conduct interviews and see how eligible they are to work for your business. Here you have to evaluate potential vendors on the basis of expertise and experience.
- Size – After experience and expertise, one of the core aspects to evaluate vendors is by considering the size. The sure-shot way to succeed here is to opt for a mid-sized software vendor selection process. Now why I am saying this is that big companies, especially software development companies tend to lack agility and inertia so getting projects ready on time could be a huge issue. A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) should be delivered by your software vendor in no more than 12 weeks. So make sure that this is fulfilled properly. Choose a company that is stable, agile and fits perfectly according to your business requirements.
- Price – Last but certainly not least, price is a very crucial factor that should be taken into consideration. Not in the first place but it should be while evaluating vendor selection. Setting a budget right from the beginning and choosing a company on the basis of experience, expertise, size, and price means that you won’t get wrong with this. The end result has to be the best. Here terms like contract negotiation, third-party vendor, price, quotations, keep on popping up.
Dispel the Famous Myths About Vendor selection process
Since I have already covered the key considerations that must be taken into account. It’s time to know the potential myths that must be busted before you consider a vendor selection team.
#1 Time and Budget is everything
One of the basic yet common assumptions made is that businesses consider time and budget and nothing else. Now what happens is companies or vendors offering cheap and fastest development does not mean that they must be chosen right then and there or they can never go wrong. In fact, most of the project failures happen because businesses end up choosing companies depending on the price. Cheap does not necessarily mean to be good. Sometimes it can make an adverse effect. And it may quite interest you to know that no developer can make a precise estimate without knowing all the details of your project. So if the company only focuses on the budget and time frame just walk over it and switch to the competitors.
#2 Fixed-price Model doesn’t Mean You Won’t Be Overspending
Many businesses tend to emphasize that going with the fixed price model is the safest option to consider as you won’t spend extravagantly. Well, to be honest, if you go with the fixed-price model, it’s the company’s responsibility to calculate all the potential risks in advance and then quote the price.
As soon as you start with the development project what happens is with time passing by, priorities can change. Certain features which you wanted to have at any cost might no longer be important to you. Now, do you think it’s possible to do without compromising on the budget? Absolutely, not!
#3 Vendor is just an executor
See there is a difference between choosing a vendor and choosing a mere developer. If you are looking for a developer then you just have to ensure that he or she is able to execute different tasks accurately or not. Now programming is not easy, there is no cookie-cutter solution, it’s pretty complex and dynamic around so ensure choosing a development team featuring different professionals such as testers, designers, developers, project managers, etc.
Choose a vendor who is proactive in nature. Check whether he has offered better solutions in the past or not! Double-check whether you will be able to make use of their experience and expertise to foresee results. In fact, avoiding problems before even they emerge.
Conclusion
So yes, this is it for now! These are the top aspects and considerations to take in mind when choosing a vendor selection team. After all, it’s all about making the right choice. The bottom line is that you need to do your homework well and nothing will be a problem in future as you will keep yourself well-prepared.