Stop 6 of 9 · Later

Vendors and proposals

Three proposals, one weighted scorecard filled with cited scores, the questions each vendor still has to answer, and a memo that survives being read a year later.

The decision you make once and live with for five years

Hazem is replacing the backup and recovery platform across all twelve clients. Three vendors, three proposals, three sets of pricing that do not compare line for line, and a decision that will shape every recovery in this course for the next five years. This is the kind of choice that gets made on a demo and a gut feeling because reading three proposals properly takes a day nobody has.

The proposals are commercial documents under whatever confidentiality you agreed. Read the terms before you attach anything. What never goes in either way: any client tenant identifier, any endpoint list you sent the vendor, and anything that would tell a reader which of your clients is running what.

Weights first, always

Write the criteria and the weights before Claude opens a proposal. Ten minutes on your own, in a file, with a number beside each line adding to a hundred. Hazem weights for a practice with twelve tenants and no night shift.

The exit criterion is the one people leave off, and it is the one that hurts. Ask it in the scorecard and you find out in week one rather than in year four.

[attach the three proposals]
Score each proposal from 1 to 5 against the criteria and weights below, then multiply out to a weighted total.

For every score, cite the page or section of that proposal the evidence came from. Where a proposal does not address a criterion, do not score it: write not stated. Do not use anything you know about these vendors from outside the attached documents.

Output a single table with one column per vendor, then a list of every not stated entry grouped by vendor.

[paste the criteria and weights]

From the scorecard above, tell me which criteria are actually deciding this. For each criterion, say how much its weight would have to move before the ranking changes, and list the criteria where the three vendors scored the same, since those are not deciding anything. Then tell me the two questions whose answers would move the result most.

Turn every not stated entry into a numbered question addressed to that vendor, in plain commercial language, each one asking for a specific artefact or figure rather than reassurance.

Then draft a recommendation memo for my own file: the decision, the weighted result, the two closest criteria, what would have to be true for the runner-up to be right, and the review date. Write it so it still makes sense to someone reading it in three years with no memory of the demos.

The artefact

The filled scorecard with a citation behind every score, the numbered question list per vendor, and the recommendation memo with its review date. The memo is the one that matters, because it is the document that explains the decision after everyone has forgotten the demos.

Mark stop 6 done