The Cost/Value Tradeoff

I just bought a Toyota Prius.

I made a list of top requirements and did some research online to generate my long list of possibilities. Through conversations with friends and sales reps, and in test drives, I reduced that list down to just two brands, Toyota and Subaru. I like that they, along with Honda, have the most sustainable track records for high reliability. To my thinking, if I can have one of the most reliable autos manufactured today for about the same price as a less reliable car, why would I look anywhere else?

I am a value buyer. I need to feel that I’m getting my money’s worth in order to feel good about a purchase, and I need to be reminded of that value often.  Not only do I get that reinforcement at the pump every week, but also knowing that my little Prius doesn’t even need maintenance service for 100K miles.

Just about every corporate enterprise apps decision-maker I’ve ever worked with shares this sentiment about value. So when it gets down to the two or three top vendors, how do you find the value vendor?

My recommendation is pretty straight forward: is the most valued feature or characteristic of Vendor A worth more to your company than the most valued feature of Vendor B? If you ask yourself these questions for your top handful of requirements, you’ll have a very good idea whether you’ve remained true to your business needs or got sidetracked by cool but less useful features.

Of course, different stakeholders may have different opinions. That’s when I opt for a visual. I like to ask key stakeholders to rate the relative value to them of each of those top five features on a scale of 1-5. I then average them, color-code them by vendor and graph them.

Sometimes a picture does say a thousand words.