Reference · Technology & Systems
Twelve questions for a software or AI proposal
A vendor is proposing something and nobody in the room can tell whether it is the right thing. Twelve questions that work regardless of the technology, and what a weak answer sounds like.
glover-works-evaluating-a-proposal.pdf
You do not need to understand the technology to evaluate the proposal. You need to understand the work it claims to improve, and whether the person proposing it does.
Ask these in order. The first four are about the problem, and a vendor who cannot answer them has not done the work — whatever the demo looked like.
What is in it
- About the problem (4 checks)
- About the proposal (4 checks)
- About afterwards (4 checks)
If a proposal survives all twelve, it is probably a good proposal. If it falls over on questions one to four, the problem is not the technology — and no amount of evaluating the technology will find that out.
Want help applying it?
These are the questions we ask on a first walkthrough. If the answers are uncomfortable, that is usually where the work starts.