George JucanManaging Partner| Organizational Perfomance Enablers NetworkWoodbridge, Ontario, Canada
Hello all,
I’m running a selection process to implement a COTS workflow solution and develop some functionality (build several workflows). While the product selection criteria are quite clear (based on functional needs), the selection criteria for development services are much more subjective to achieve the right “fit”. From previous experiences I consider the following perspectives as critical for assessing the professional services requested from vendors:
? Organizational Capability, which includes general criteria such as company size, years in business, number of people available for the project and their qualifications etc.
? Ability to meet the needs with product features, not workarounds or development as the business features required are relatively common. This implies a preference for “assembly” of existing components, not “build” from scratch.
? Effort estimate: a smaller effort required to deliver the scope of work is a clear indication of platform’s “ease of use”, assuming that all vendors perform the estimate based on their product-qualified specialists.
? Shorter duration: for equal or equivalent effort level a shorter duration is usually achieved by utilizing more resources to deliver the functionality. The ability to achieve a shorter duration implies scalability in work distribution, a.k.a. the ability to parallelize work, providing the option of crashing a project schedule by increasing team size to meet a tight deadline.
? Average per-diem cost: while total cost is mostly influenced by the effort/duration estimates, per-diem average cost (total cost divided by sum of days for all resources) also reflects cost of future change requests (not included in initial contract) and is a clear indication of resources availability on the labor market (more availability drives prices down).
? Resources availability: while hard to quantify the free labour market, it seems an essential criterion for long-term sustainability and achieving vendor independence.
I would appreciate any thought anyone may have about other perspectives that I missed, or specific selection criteria and evaluation scales or techniques you may have encountered, especially with relevance to developing using a platform/framework compared with developing software from scratch.
Thank you,
George Jucan
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Richard HowProgramme Management Consultant| How Associates LtdHarthill, South Yorkshire, United Kingdom
as you are taking a development service you may want to enquire about their project management skills and how they intend to manage your project, the sorts of reporting they will offer for progress and expenditure. Their change control processes and all the other project management type stuff that will help keep their work on track for you. Be especially careful about how they are going to define what is in their scope and what is outside of their scope. you dont want to get to the end and find a critical componant is missing becuase you both thought hte other was delivering it.
