You should now have a good list of potential vendors that will help you meet your strategic objectives. What do you do now? There are several approaches to that.

First, there is the "let's test all of the packages ourselves until we can't remember which packages are which and we get tired because there are too many packages to test and so we give up and just pick one" approach. A couple of problems here. You really do not have time to do all of the tools justice. You need to take more than a cursory look to really evaluate a tool. You run the real risk of hitting the "best fit" tool (the one that is a good fit for you) when you are tired and you don't give it much of a look. It takes time to learn how a system works and how it could accomplish your objectives. But hey, more power to you if you want to go this route.



Second, there is the "I don't want to test every system, so let's have the vendors show us their systems, so we will schedule a demo with all of the vendors, so that in 2 weeks we will never remember what we liked about which system, in fact we can't even remember what features went with what system now, so let's just pick the last one that we remember that looked all right" approach. I'm sure you can see some issues here as well, this isn't rocket science. You can't do a thorough examination, and it's not fair to the vendors to put them through an evaluation like this either.

Trials and demos have their place, but let's face it. You don't have the time, and can't do an evaluation properly that way. So what do you do with the list of vendors that you have?

Let me recommend an approach. Before you start conduct trials and demos of software, do one step first to save yourself a lot of time and mistakes. Let the vendors do the work for you, but in a fair way. Put together a list of questions derived from your comparison chart. Send this list of questions to each of the vendors on your list. Give them a deadline in which to respond.

This will do a few things. One, it will take what you think the vendor does and confirm it. Two, it will identify some vendors that should not be in the list. Three, it will tell you some things about the vendor such as how professional they are, how responsive they are, etc. You can tell these things from the way they answer the questions, how they interact with you, etc.

All you need to do is find a contact email address on the vendor's website. Believe me, they will respond to a good prospect looking for project management software.

This will help you identify the vendors at which you should REALLY take a closer look.

More on that...