7/11/2006

Screening Global Development Vendors - Some Criteria & Steps

In our last blog, we had submitted a request to find a global web-application development partner...

As of tonight (1 week later), we have collected 33 responses.

Here are a few ways in which the respondents stood out:

- one group's answer to "how will your employees benefit from this project?" was "our marriage will improve!". Turns out to be a husband-wife team.

- only one of the respondents used the Guru bulletin board capability to send me a question. Unfortunately, it was largely just a repeat of their response, so they lost the opportunity for direct dialogue

- only one of the respondents skipped the Guru system altogether and called me several times before emailing me. I told him I'd get him the mix, but since I don't have a written response, he may miss the cut

- only one of the respondents seems to have read my blog and web-site. Scores extra points

- probably about 20-30% actually answered my 3 questions (see the Part I blog)

Ryan, interim-COO, put together an analysis spreadsheet summarizing the characteristics of each vendor. That gave me a birds-eye view of all responses.

Now for the hard part. I spent an hour sitting by the pool marking up the spreadsheet and the detailed descriptive responses sent in through Guru. Life could be worse.

Basically, I screen for:

a) how well do they respond to my query. I look for completeness (answer all questions) and succinctness. Too sparse, they lose points. Too verbose, they lose points.

b) how well do the skills match our needs. I like to see a broad mix of ASP/.Net, J2EE, AJAX, Open Source (LAMP)

c) the sites they've worked on. (I haven't had a chance to review them yet) Lets look for professional look first, the ability to do work that is "edgy" second

d) any special items that stick out (e.g. talking about their employees with great pride, local to Wayne, etc.)

e) size of firm (10-50 is ideal, but larger is okay, too small is worst)

The result is that we've identified a short-list of 12 or so respondents. These respondents have been broken into 3 tiers and will be given the chance to respond to the next level of questions.

The "next level" email goes something like:

a) thank them for their response

b) acknowledge that they are part of a select group we are responding to

c) some follow-up questions are (tailor for the vendor if they've already answered the question):
- how soon can they start
- do they do requirements or do they need us to do them? If the former, how do they gather them from us?
- have they worked with any merchant accounts for transactions (examples)
- have they created any community building sites (examples)

Why ask another level of questions?

Several reasons:
- I need another pass of screening as I have too many candidates to call each
- I have different needs for different projects, I'm building a database of possible future partners
- I can test out responsiveness and attention to detail much better

Well... the saga continues. Stay tuned for the results.

(CEO) Cheap Executive Officer, Skip Shuda

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