Article · 15 March 2021
Free: A decision matrix to compare website vendors
The decision-making process to choose a new website vendor can be overwhelming. Entle has developed a free tool to help your team make a clear, robust, and easy-to-communicate decision.
Image credit: Entle x Midjourney
Background
A good website is one of the most important investments your organisation can make, so it's important to choose the right partner to deliver it. This is often easier said than done: the number of providers, the multitude of ways to compare them, and the range of different technical products and configurations used can be overwhelming. And to build a consensus around the final decision in a multi-stakeholder environment can be a protracted, exhausting process, increasing the risk of timeline overruns and missing out on important opportunities in your market.
A well-defined decision-making tool can alleviate these problems, lend a robust structure to your procurement process, and help you build an internal consensus.
The key elements of such a tool are:
- It must be codified, i.e. documented, to allow easy collaboration and sharing.
- It must reduce your team's cognitive load, by breaking down the decision into smaller, manageable chunks.
- It must be comprehensive, but not overwhelming: it should capture all the key criteria, but eliminate noise.
- It must accommodate uncertainty and risk, as it is impossible to have perfect knowledge about your vendors.
Based on our experience as a vendor in enterprise procurement contexts, we've developed a spreadsheet-based decision-making tool that meets the above requirements.
Who should use this
This tool helps you choose a vendor to design and develop a new website for your organisation. It is adapted for contexts where multiple stakeholders are involved in the decision (e.g. your marketing team, your CRO, and your CTO), where you are considering multiple vendors, and where you and your team need communicate your decision to build an internal consensus.
Benefits of the tool
The tool includes a range of the most important criteria for an enterprise website, categorised by area, and allows for your team to assign weights to each criterium based on how important you believe it is to your project. You can also easily add or remove criteria to adapt the tool to your specific needs.
Once you have finalised your criteria and weights, the tool lets you list your potential vendors and assign a score based on how confident you are that they can deliver on each criterium. The confidence score allows you to account for uncertainty and should be based on what you have concretely seen, read, and heard from and about each vendor.
By using the tool, you can derive overall scores for each vendor that reflects their suitability to your requirements. And because the areas and criteria that constitute the overall score are clearly visible, the tool makes it easier to communicate and build a concensus around your decision. You and your team can also easily discuss and adjust your scores for each criterium as you receive new information — the overall scores are updated in real time.
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