4 Things to Consider when Choosing Best-fit Software Vendors
Selecting the right software vendor can be the catalyst for true digital transformation in an organization. However, enterprise software vendor selection can be a nightmarish process, with countless meetings, RFPs, documents, and excess workloads. It’s 2023, and finding the right solution doesn’t have to be so difficult! Selecting the right software vendor can be a seamless journey – if you take these four key considerations into account.
How to find the Best-fit Software Vendor
1. Don’t Skip or Shortcut the Enterprise Software Vendor Selection Process
A thorough process will result in choosing the right solution. Getting the software vendor selection process right is all about choosing the best solution to meet your organization’s specific business needs. To determine these needs, the organization must run a thorough process which includes:
1. Discovery – Understanding the business case for the solution required
2. Requirements Gathering – Understanding the needs of the business
4. Understanding costs – Calculating the ROI on the right solution
5. Vendor Scoring – Comparing vendors to the requirements and needs of the org
6. Shortlisting best-fit solution vendors
7. Demoing the shortlist
Skipping over or shortcutting the process carries a huge risk, such as a lack of user buy-in from the organization, which could affect user adoption metrics come implementation time.
2. Gather and Rank the Vendor Selection Criteria (Requirements)
Managing requirements for software vendor selection can be a complicated and arduous task. For example, RFPs, RFIs, and other requirements elicitation documents are often over 100 pages with multiple changes throughout the process, costing companies time and resources – not to mention the risk of stakeholder burnout and disengagement.
Running a thorough requirements management process that includes gathering software vendor selection criteria is critical for aligning stakeholders on project goals and building consensus to find the right solutions for the business needs.
The requirements process should not add excess workloads with meetings, spreadsheets, and RFPs. When gathering, managing, and evaluating selection criteria in the form of requirements, the organization must be guided in defining and prioritizing the business requirements. For this reason, requirements must be extremely specific to the needs of the business.
3. Don’t Neglect Organizational Buy-In and Change Management
Replacing or finding new software vendors to transform digitally can be a huge change for some organizations. A significant challenge digital transformation presents is Change Management. Failure to communicate and rationalize digital transformation goals to key stakeholders means you fail to align the team with the project vision, which causes an unfortunate ripple effect.
By implementation, staff buy-in can be dangerously low, which results in low user adoption, AKA digital transformation failure.
Getting buy-in relies on a solid change management strategy.
Olive has re-imagined transformative collaboration to help our customers truly understand what is needed in the organization to drive change. Our customers see high user adoption because they leverage Olive to work in ways that engage leaders, stakeholders, and line employees regardless of the industry or business size. The same hurdles for getting buy-in are circumvented by giving your team an efficient voice with Olive.
4. Spend 66% Less time on Software Vendor Selection by Automating the Process
Using Olive helps consultants and organizations find the right software vendors in 66% less time without sacrificing due diligence.
Olive enhances collaboration with key stakeholders to develop and manage requirements, compare these requirements to solution vendors, and shortlist the perfect software vendors to demo. Oliveeliminates vendors who won’t meet the business needs.
Olive automates the software vendor selection process, making it easy to collaborate with stakeholders to identify and rank requirements. With Olive, you can anonymously look at available software vendors within the context of how these solutions meet business needs.
With Olive, you can check out similar project requirements ahead of time in requirements libraries, easily gather stakeholder feedback through surveys, and easily filter out vendors based on your requirements. Eliminate vendors who don’t meet the business needs and ensure the proposed solution is perfectly matched.
