It is unlikely that any vendor will be able to meet every one of your requirements. Therefore, before engaging with vendors it is important to determine the importance of each by assessing a weight to each requirement.

The process of prioritization is a relatively simple, albeit sometimes painful, one. Once requirements have been defined and agreed upon, get your key stakeholders back in a room. You will walk through the list, one by one, assigning a priority to each. Prior to beginning, you will find it important to spell out the exact definition of each priority level. I've generally tried to encourage my clients to stick with the basic 'high, medium, and low'. A proposed example might be:

• High: We must have this and absolutely cannot live without it.
• Medium: Effectiveness of the application would be limited without it.
• Low: Nice to have functionality.

The reason you will want all of your stakeholders together for this exercise is to ensure consistent weighting of requirements across work streams. Having broad representation contributing to the discussion will help prevent one work stream from being weighted differently than another.

Third Step: Develop a Vendor List