Selection Bias: How to Avoid Errors in Solution Selection

Selecting the right solution for your business is a decision with far-reaching implications. Whether it’s choosing a software platform, a new vendor, or a critical system, the stakes are high. A thorough solution selection process ensures your organization aligns its decisions with key business goals, streamlining operations and driving long-term success. However, this process is not immune to pitfalls—especially when biases creep in.

This article unpacks the dangers of selection bias and explores the strategies you can adopt to avoid these errors. You’ll learn about common areas where bias and errors appear, such as rushing evaluations or conflating vendor likability with solution quality. We’ll also guide you through concrete steps to combat bias, including building a balanced selection committee, defining and ranking business requirements, creating structured demo scripts, and objectively evaluating solutions against clear criteria. By the end, you’ll be equipped with the tools and knowledge to make informed, unbiased, and effective decisions that serve your organization’s best interests.

Common Areas for Bias and Errors in Solution Selection

Selection bias, whether it’s favoring a flashy feature, aligning too closely with a vendor, or neglecting business requirements, can lead to costly errors and misaligned priorities. These mistakes not only sap resources but also hinder growth and innovation. Despite best intentions, everybody can be subject to biases. Here are a few areas we have seen biases creep in when selecting a solution.

Failing to Gather or Prioritize Business Requirements

Often, the conversation shifts too quickly to how a system should function, instead of first addressing why it’s needed. It can be easy to get caught up in the features you want in a solution. However, this technology-first mentality leads people astray with new technologies, flashy demos, and irrelevant bells and whistles without stopping to ask if any of those features would help them reach their business goals.

Waiting Too Long Before Ranking Solutions

Another common issue happens when too much time passes between a demo and ranking the solution. Delays can lead to less accurate evaluations, as biases may begin to influence perceptions. Factors like the likability of the presenter or excitement over flashy new features—features that may not even be essential to your business—can skew judgment. Waiting too long may also mean that you’ve seen multiple demos for various solutions, and it can be difficult to remember details from the earlier demos.

Conflating Vendors with Solutions

Another cause for bias is when people are unable to separate their feelings of the vendor from the solution. People often have the propensity to dismiss a software solution due to disliking the vendor. On the other hand, they could be biased toward the solution because the vendor gave a great presentation even if the vendor didn’t demonstrate that the solution would be able to meet critical requirements.

Evaluating the solution and vendor separately can mitigate these biases and ensure that the focus remains on finding the best solution for your business needs, rather than being swayed by personal preferences or sales tactics.

Strategies to Avoid Biases in Solution Selection

Over our many years of experience working with vendors and navigating the solution selection process, we’ve identified key strategies to ensure success. These are our top tips for avoiding common biases, evaluating options objectively, and ultimately landing on the best solution that aligns with your organization’s unique needs and goals.

Build a Robust Selection Committee

The first step to ensuring an unbiased solution selection process is to form a well-rounded solution selection committee made up of stakeholders for every key area of your business. Initially, these stakeholders will be responsible for thoroughly defining the business requirements for their respective areas so they can be accounted for during the selection process. The selection committee will then be responsible for attending software demonstrations, evaluating the software against the requirements and ultimately working together to make a final selection.

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Gather Business Requirements

Business requirements are the backbone of an unbiased and effective solution selection process. Before talking about what solutions you might be interested in exploring for your business it is imperative that all your business requirements are well documented and understood.

It’s important to distinguish between business requirements and software solution requirements. Often, the conversation shifts too quickly to how a system should function, instead of first addressing why it’s needed. By prioritizing the “why,” you create opportunities for innovative solutions that can meet your needs in varied and effective ways.

These business requirements become the core content for the Request For Proposal (RFP) that is submitted to vendors. Not only does this help the selection committee take a business first mentality, but it also helps the vendors focus on the features of their solutions which best meet your business objectives.

Rank Requirements According to Importance

Once all requirements have been gathered and agreed upon, the selection committee should rank each of the requirements based on its importance. This helps eliminate bias by taking the importance of a requirement into consideration when comparing a solution’s ability to meet the requirement. For example, if there is a requirement that is ranked only as desirable and another requirement is ranked as critical, the solution that meets the critical requirement should win out over the one that doesn’t meet that only meets the desirable requirement.

To achieve alignment on ranking requirements, the committee must be aligned on what the ranking scale is and what exactly each ranking means. By clearly defining the levels of importance, comparisons can be sure to be much more objective.

Here is an example from the requirement importance ranking from a recent solution selection project:

Score: 5 – Critically Important The documented requirement is critical to core business functions and must be met in order to begin using the new solution.

When the committee diligently ranks requirements based on agreed-upon criteria, it generates high-quality data that enables meaningful conversations and informed decisions.

Create a Specific Demo Script

With your requirements ranked, you have the foundation needed to build a demonstration script for potential vendors to follow. The demo script should include the most important business processes you want to see demonstrated. This should include end-to-end business processes (for example, the process for receiving a customer order all the way through shipping and invoicing that order) as well as relevant test data such as products, customers, and vendors.

When creating the demo scripts, it’s important to relate it back to the documented requirements and verify every single critical requirement (level 5 importance) is covered by the scripts as well as most essential (4) and needed (3).

Clearly defining the demo script is vital to getting the most relevant information from a demonstration, but it must also be paired with holding the vendors accountable to sticking with the scripts. When left unchecked, software vendors often showcase the various bells and whistles of their system in a flashy sales pitch rather than demonstrating how their solution will align with your most important business processes.  This approach leads to very lengthy demos and missing out on seeing how critical business requirements will be met by the solution.

Also, keep in mind that some demonstrations can hide how processes are truly executed, so be sure to insist on observing the actual process of key requirements. Ensure that you’re truly getting a demonstration of end-to-end processes vs a vendor just telling you that the solution can meet the requirements. This of course isn’t needed for every single requirement or use case, but should be done for the most critical requirements to your organization. 

Depending on the scope of the project and the number of requirements, more than one demonstration is generally required to produce a full picture of each solution being evaluated.

Read this article for more information on acquiring high-quality, relevant demos.

Rank the Solutions Based on Pre-Determined Criteria

During or immediately following demos, each solution selection committee member should rank the solution by how well the solution met each of the requirements based on what was demonstrated. Each committee member should take a methodical, requirement by requirement approach to ensure nothing is overlooked, and include any additional likes and dislikes that stood out to them.

Meaningful solution ranking will take time, but it is key to making the correct decision for your business.

As with ranking requirements, to achieve alignment on ranking solutions the committee must be aligned on what the ranking scale is and what exactly each ranking means. This should be much more than simply a gut check or the subjective opinion of committee members.

Here is an example from the solution ranking criteria from a recent solutions selection project:

Score: 2 – Partially Meets Requirements The demonstrated functionality or solution offers basic functionality to meet part of the requirement but requires customization or workarounds to meet the business needs, resulting in added complexity or cost.

If the committee is diligent in ranking solutions using an agreed upon criteria you will have high quality data that enables meaningful conversations and decisions.

Solution Comparison & Selection

With all the data collected during solution ranking, you now have the foundation set to make an objective decision. You are now equipped to compare how each solution ranks against each of your business requirements and come up with an overall score. Here you can begin to really dig into the data and should focus first on comparing your top requirements.

It is likely that multiple solutions will have similar overall scores as there are many solutions in the marketplace with similar functionality. Pricing comparisons will then become a key part of the decision-making process with both the subscription and implementation costs being considered. Make sure to get the total cost of ownership for each solution over the same time period, as this ensures accurate price comparisons between solutions.

At this point, it should be clear whether there is a standout winner. If no obvious choice emerges, it’s time to evaluate the “nice-to-have” features and secondary requirements to guide your decision.

Conclusion: Avoiding Biases in Your Solution Selection

Selecting a solution is not just about finding the one with the most features or the lowest price – it’s about finding the one that will truly support and enhance your organization’s processes and goals. Companies often end up with an ill-fitting solution by failing to gather or prioritize requirements, allowing too much time to pass between the demo and ranking the solution, and conflating vendors with solutions.

By building a robust selection committee that is aligned and educated on requirements, you can ensure consistent ranking and prioritization of solutions. Providing demo scripts to vendors and requesting end-to-end demonstrations can help contextualize sales pitches and keep vendors focused. This approach ensures the focus remains on whether the solution truly delivers the functionality you require.

If you or your team are struggling to make a decision, it may be helpful to bring in an external consultant who has experience with solution selection and can provide unbiased guidance. Contact us for a free consultation or check out our Solution Selection Guidance service for more information. Remember, the right solution is out there and by following a thorough process, you can confidently select the best fit for your business needs.

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