Joshua Hover recently wrote a thoughtful blog post about choosing the right Sitecore partner. Everything he said was on the right track and generalizes to other digital experience tools with minor changes. However, it seems to me that some of the questions Josh suggests are questions that an inexperienced buyer who doesn’t frequently contract with an outside agency isn’t well equipped to answer. Even some of the simple, concrete questions like how many certified individuals the partner has potentially leaves the buyer open to the old sell the A team, staff the C team switcheroo that some vendors like to pull. Here's my suggestion for some questions that an inexperienced buyer could ask. These fit Josh's framework but require less interpretive work from the buyer.

1. Will all of the technical resources on my project be certified?

2. Are you willing to put that in the contract?

3. What percentage of your SOWs last year were repeat business with existing clients? You have to take stage and growth rate into consideration when evaluating the answer. For a 3 yr old, high growth agency, it’s probably not going to be half, but for a 15 year old mature agency, it should be well above half.

4. For the last three projects you delivered on this platform, what was the number of days difference between the originally planned go live date and the actual go live date?

5. What do you mean you don’t know? I'm only half joking with this question. It is shocking how many implementation teams don't keep track of their performance metrics. If they don't measure it, they can't improve it.

6. If you do know, what was the cause of the variance?

7. What percentage of your projects in the last year had change orders that altered the budget or schedule?

8. What were the main causes of budget or schedule variance in the last year?

9. What lessons did you learn from that and how will those lessons reduce the risk of schedule and budget variance on my project?

10. How do you identify what stakeholder expectations are throughout the project and ensure that your work is aligning to them. The right answer here is more than ‘we ensure QA in every sprint’. You’re looking for a mix of ability to identify who the stakeholders should be, even if you, the buyer, might have missed some of them, an understanding that stakeholders often are imprecise and forgetful when stating their desires, and that once they see what was built as a result of what they said, they may realize it wasn’t what they meant. There are lots of ways to do that. You need to hear one that works with the way your organization works.

11. What are your expectations of me and my team throughout this project? In most cases, a vendor who expects higher involvement from you will give you better results than one who wants to run off and do the project in the dark.

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What, if anything, would you add to that list?

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