FPA and Quality Metrics in Contracts

Outsourcing software development projects continues to be a very difficult task for many organizations. They struggle with the questions they should ask in the 'Request for Proposal (RFP)' phase. These organizations wish to find the questions that enable them to compare the bidding suppliers in an objective, yet meaningful way and they wish to select the right supplier based on this comparison. In practice, the industry sees many RFP's that seem to comply to this goal, but when looked into a little detailed, it becomes obvious that in many cases the comparison is not objective and meaningful at all and even that in many cases the wrong supplier is selected, often resulting in failing projects. Repeatedly, suppliers argue with client organizations about the objective reasoning for missed offers and sometimes they even start legal actions.