[Sigia-l] Finding and Choosing a Consultant

[Ziya Oz]

Christopher Fahey:

> $379 for 5 pages. I have no idea if this stuff is any good,

Neither do I. But reading the brief summary there raises some serious red
flags the size of Montana for me.

I find the current "best practice" of RPFs fundamentally broken. To
reiterate, the orthodoxy assumes that the problem is already framed by the
company seeking the solicitations. More often than not that just isn't so.
And therein lies the bottomless pitfall.

The company says, for example, that an ecommerce site has to be build for a
certain line of products and proceeds to list, say, a dozen requirements. At
that point without some serious research time, potential vendors have no
idea if, say, a recommendation engine would be useful in that specific
context. Incorporation of such a feature is no small matter: in-house or
outsourced? How scalable? How well integrated? How fast? How comprehensive?
How presented? And million other questions... Or the reverse case where the
company explicitly requires it but, more realistically, it may not be a
cost-effective or UX-effective tool in this particular context.

There are often many significant issues like these that remain unaddressed
by the RPF process which pretty much locks in both sides and thereby
prejudges the optimal solution even before the work begins. By concentrating
on deliverables first, this "best practice" chases after mediocrity as it
takes away the incentive to contextualize problems and innovate.

Like the waterfall process, it gives the illusion of agreement by the
company (that usually hasn't really thought through the problem) and the
vendor (that usually cannot really think through it properly before the
fact).

But if Forrester says it must be done that way, who am I to argue? :-)

----
Ziya

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted,
they would have asked for a faster horse." -- Henry Ford