Selecting a Website Product
Define Requirements, Review, Rate and Choose the Best Product
Aug 16, 2007
It’s rare these days for a company to build a website from scratch. Instead, they look at the vast number of products and services available on the market to give them as much functionality out of the box as possible. This enables them to get a site up and running much more quickly then if they had to design and develop their own custom site. Enter the product selection process. It can be as in-depth or as basic as you need; however, to ensure you choose wisely, follow this 6 step process.
Step 1: Determine your requirements
Pull together a team that will document all the requirements for the new system/solution. You need to ensure you have business people and technical people defining your requirements. Make sure you capture the high level categories of functional and technical requirements and then go as detailed as you can within the categories. Also include some general criteria for vendor evaluation (such as company size, revenues) – this will help you determine how long the company has been and will be around.
Step 2: Create an evaluation rating scheme form
Using your requirements lists, create a rating schema. Each item on the requirements lists needs to have a priority (required, nice to have, critical) and a rate (use 1-5). Create this rating prior to seeing any vendor responses so you aren’t influenced by something they include in their proposal.
Step 3: Select between 2 and 4 products to review.
How do you pick the best products to review? There are a couple of ways:
- Research the web: there are tons of product reviews on the web today. Just Google the product type (like portal software) and look for sites that review products.
- Gartner Research: Gartner does what is called Magic Quadrants for various software categories like content management, portal, CRM. They tell you what the best of the category is and what their strengths are. You have to pay for Gartner research, but it’s worth it if there are a lot of products on the market and it’s difficult to narrow the field.
- Forrester is another research company that provides in-depth technical reviews of products. You can purchase a review of a single product, or compare a number of products in a specific category. They will outline standard functionality and technical reviews for the product. Again, you have to pay for the reports.
Step 4: Send out request for Proposals
Send out a request for proposal (RFP) to the selected vendors, giving them your requirements. Ask for a product demonstration, licensing and maintenance costs. Give them a couple of scenarios you would like to see demoed – otherwise you may see a lot of neat things – but nothing you really wanted. These demonstrations can be virtual or in-person. Some even provide temporary access to actual demo websites where you can look around and try the functionality for yourself.
Step 5: Rate the products.
After each proposal review and presentation, stay together as a team and discuss the product and the presentation. Then using the evaluation form you created in Step 2, rate the product. Have a person record the rating of each person on the evaluation team and sum up the total score.
Step 6: Select product
Engage the vendor in the purchase of the product and potentially installation and support.
This process works great for any type of product you need to purchase. If it’s too intensive for your needs, consider going to Forrester and getting the detailed product comparison evaluations. At a minimum, research, research, research, and have a group evaluate the research together.
