You want to buy a widget. Or you want someone to run your
widget farm.
You can’t just go pick a widget vendor, or a widget services
provider. Rules require that you ask for anyone who is in the widget business
to “Make me an offer.”
And so you get five, or ten, or fifty widget proposals. Each
promises to give you the best widget, with the best possible widget results.
How can you tell them apart?
The IT marketplace is large but finite. All vendors operate
in the same technology space – same platforms, same software, same operating
systems. Most are within the same labor
market, paying the same wages and salaries to attract and retain staff. So any
IT solution pretty much looks the same. Procurement officials can eliminate
offers that are obviously incompetent, but mostly the suppliers look pretty
vanilla from the outside. Some bidders use proposal templates from third-party
proposal support companies, so the proposals literally look identical. The main
differences are in how good the proposal writing team is at their job…and they won’t
be involved in actually delivering the services. Do you believe the proposal
that uses the most superlatives?
Or is more effective to just pare down to those who appear
competent and pick the lowest price? After all, saying you have the best management approach doesn’t make it so.
No one ever got in trouble for picking lowest price.
No comments:
Post a Comment