Assessing Vendors

Phase 4

Scoring, Weighting, and Sorting

4.1 Scoring, Weighting, and Sorting

4.1.1 Filtering Out Losers

4.1.2 Selecting Winners

4.1 Scoring, Weighting, and Sorting

Now, it is time to score your vendors. You have assigned questions to each variable and gone through the process and answered all questions for all vendors. Now you need to average each variable’s questions together and begin scoring them. While you can arrange the scale any way you prefer and do complex weighting, I find it works best to use a simple positively maximized linear scale and weight at the end. That sentence is horribly mathy, so let me elaborate with an example:

If you were analyzing a firewall vendor for Availability, you would have questions like:

Availability: