Sooner or later in your project management career, you will need to procure products or services for your projects. However, during the early stages of the procurement process, you may not have a clear picture of the requirements from which to base the vendor selection process.

Here are seven simple steps to select suppliers for your projects.

1. Draft the business requirements documents (BRD)
2. Invite key vendors for initial meetings to get a sense of the various offerings
3. Prepare a selection matrix based on the BRD and the vendors’ offerings
4. Ask the vendors to perform self-assessments using the vendor selection matrix
5. Invite short-listed vendors for in-depth discussions to vet their self-assessments
6. Address the discrepancies between your assessments and their self-assessments
7. Select the vendor based on the qualitative and quantitative merits of the assessments

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