Vendor Assessment
Choosing vendors is one of the most important and difficult tasks facing a project manager. While the net result of choosing a vendor is to purchase a product or service, the process of making this decision can be distracting, time consuming, and often overwhelming. A complete vendor assessment looks at more than just the product or service. Assessing vendors helps to manage expectations of vendor involvement in project completion, balances the preparedness of internal processes with vendor abilities, and takes into consideration the long term ramifications of product support, upgrade availability, and vendor stability.
Many niche markets have specialty vendors with excellent products aimed at specific product groups. Some examples include glass, tempering, marketing, CNC milling, and retail. These vendors have expertise in product areas that makes their software or hardware uniquely suited to fill a need. However, these vendors are often smaller and have certain strengths and weaknesses. Preparing a project to deal with these strengths and weaknesses so expectations of results are correct is another function of the vendor assessment.
