Hi Srikanth,

1) If your BRD is not already in an itemized format, I would extract all the requirements from the document and put them into a list.  Look at your requirements list and for each requirement ask yourself "if I added a question mark to the end of each sentence, can I provide a yes or no answer to the question?".  For requirements that can't be easily answered, review those descriptions and modify them so that you can have a clear answer.  Voila!  You now have your evaluation criteria.  Add two columns to the right: one for the yes/no checkbox and one for a 'notes/details' section where you can write additional information or qualifications on the yes/no answer.

2) Before scheduling a product demo, I would tell your vendors to fill out the checklist you've created above.  Then the product demo can be focused on having the vendor show you how the application addresses each requirement they indicated their product can meet, as opposed to becoming a marketing/sales driven meeting.  If you have too many requirements to review in one meeting, focus on the most important and/or ones that differentiate the solution from others you are evaluating.  Once they've proven they can meet the requirement, move on to the next one on your list.  This way you're in control of the meeting instead of the other way around.

Jarett

 Hi Srikanth,

Good advice from Larimar. Something else to consider as well is to put priorities  against your requirements. Some will be must have deal breakers and some will be nice to haves that you don't really care that much about... and some will be somewhere in between. If you assign numbers to them (give them weightings based on their importance) you can end up with a final score for each vendor.  

A note of caution on all this. I worked on a large vendor evaluation project where we did all these good things. Spent many man months working on the evaluation. We thought we did well and under the terms of reference we were given, we did. Then a lady joined the project who started to question the premise on which the whole evaluation was based. She caused a lot of trouble and was assassinated professionally and ostracised by the project team. She stuck to her guns and was ultimately proved correct. I learnt a lot from that. Guess my point is, don't get hung up on the process and continue to question everything. Stick to your guns if you think you're right too. Her main message  was to be clear about where you want to go - your future state - and make sure that what your are evaluating and the way you are evaluating it will get you there.

Kimbo