Choosing the right vendor team for your needs can be somewhat complicated – the decision itself may be impacted by budget constraints, your team’s skillset and bandwidth, technical constraints, scope of work, and more. In addition, teams and individuals evaluating and selecting vendors need to follow all relevant laws and procedures as they work. Below, we’ve identified some technical factors that we have used that agencies may adopt, at their discretion, as part of the vendor evaluation and selection processes.


 Please feel free to adopt some or all of the following as criteria for assessing vendors’ technical proposals. You might also consider using this list as a jumping-off point for your own state’s Vendor team characteristics list. Note that applicable laws and procedures may require additional or different factors and criteria—your team must follow all legal requirements. If legal requirements conflict with any of the information that follows, legal requirements take precedence.

Vendor characteristics

  • They’re agile (or agile leaning): Our team works in an agile way, prioritizing people over processes, developing and testing low-fidelity prototypes and iterating on them as we learn from our users, and favoring smaller, mid-process milestones over major releases. Working agilely allows us to make small changes, learn from them, and act on our learnings, rather than requiring us to wait until the end of a project (or a major launch) to learn from our work. In this way, agile is more cost effective and can yield stronger outcomes. We prefer to work with vendor teams who also practice agile and are already familiar with that approach and its workflows, ceremonies, and more.
  • They follow practices of human centered design: Users are at the core of everything we do. Our target user group may change based on what we’re working on – sometimes our work may be more focused on claimants or employers, and other times, we may be more focused on serving state teams – but we rely on our users’ documented needs, desired outcomes, and pain points as we make product decisions. Vendors we work with should be well versed in human centered design methodologies and should be able to deftly balance user needs with business requirements.
  • They have a high level of design and content maturity: One of our team’s goals is to promote design, customer experience, and content strategy best practices for all UI agencies. Members of our team have extensive experience working in product management, UX (user experience) design, UX research, content strategy, visual design, and more, and we seek to work with teams with a similar level of design and content maturity to ensure cohesive working relationships.
  • They’re comfortable working within set technical constraints: The various state agencies we’ve worked with are at different levels of modernization: some are just starting out on their modernization journeys and still work, in large part, with legacy systems, while others may have more modern platforms. Any vendors we work with must be comfortable working within technical constraints and recognize that seemingly technical problems can be approached from multiple standpoints.
  • They have experience working with government agencies: Federal agencies and teams may follow different protocols and be one held to different security and privacy standards than their private-sector counterparts. Vendors should recognize this and (ideally) be familiar with the unique working conditions federal employees may encounter. 

 

Note: In selecting vendors and administering contracts, you should comply with all laws and procedures that apply to your state’s procurement activities, as well as with the terms of any Federal grant or other Federal assistance program that may be used to fund such procurements.  This document is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to replace or alter laws, policies and rules governing procurement activities.