A strong partnership with your key IT vendors can offer a genuine competitive advantage.  A vendor who wants to benefit from a long-term relationship with your company will take on the role of technical consultant.  When your vendor presents a proposal, use that opportunity to ask some important questions that will help you with planning and risk management.

The link below will take you to a presentation on this subject.  The twelve key questions are also listed below.

Vendor.Challenge

Twelve Important Question

1. Have you made any assumptions about our requirements that you would like to verify today?
2. What process did you follow to ensure that you understood and will be able to meet our requirements?
3. How have you validated that this design will meet our requirements?
4. Who else within our industry has taken this approach?
5. Are you aware of any quality problems with any of the components in this design?
6. Have all components and interfaces been tested together successfully?
7. Is there anything you would have liked to include in your design, but omitted due to price considerations?
8. As our system workload increases, what is the first resource we are likely to exhaust?
9. How will this system change the way we operate today?
10. What physical site preparations will this design require?
11. Are you of the opinion that we have the people resources needed to successfully complete this project?
12. What do you think will be our greatest challenge in implementing this system?