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How much should you let vendors assist in your requirement gathering?
When you're looking at purchasing a new software for your business, one of the keys to a successful implementation is clearly mapping out your requirements. From existing infrastructure, to user needs, to feature requirements, to end goals of the technology, multiple locations, etc.; businesses sometimes have a vast amount of information to collect before making a decision. How much should vendors assist their prospects with this?
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3 Answers
Remember, the vendor you are dealing with is trying to sell their product. If they are a key part of your requirement gathering process, they will likely steer your requirements towards their strengths. This may/may not be in line with your actual needs.
Interviewing a number of potential vendors may help you narrow down your requirements by helping you understand what feature set is available, but they may not have your best interest as their focus. If you go in with this understanding, they can be a good partner in building requirements.
RJL
I agree with Robert, leveraging your vendors to provide requirements is not all bad. Their role in consultive selling will lead you to their solution, but having multiple vendors providing requirements will help you see a larger picture.
Nothing would keep you from combining all of the requirements into a system that meets your needs. It just might cause a vendor to think outside of the box to integrate some additional requirements you have into their solution.
Be up front, let them know you are speaking with several vendors, and even let them know who their competition is - you may get better pricing, better pre-sales service, and more.
And, your vendors should be able to help you learn from the experience as well. They will have a wealth of knowledge from selling to their other customers and will educate you on potential deployment strategies, features, etc. that you may not have thought of, or even considered. It could be a very educational experience for you. If its not, I suspect your vendores will be disappointed in themselves.
Always make sure you have a general understanding of the requirements you need for your company. Look at the proposal and suggestions from the vendor as an education in features you may or may not need. Odds are they have put many systems in, but just because they say something should be one way, that is not always the best way or the way it should work for your company.
I have had many cases where software companies have all said the best way to do a process is the way they have it built in there system but when key weaknesses were pointed out they agreed and admitted they never thought of that (mostly because their customers had not brought it up). The difference came in my unique requirements that were something different then all their other customers. In every case, at least one of the companies would work with me to alter or change the solution to meet my requirements.
As the others said, get as many bids as you can. This will help you in pricing, feature sets, and finding processes you want to add to your requirements.
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