Source Selection Analysis

Procurement technique · See it on the map

Runnable here

Choosing how you will pick a vendor before you start looking for one.

When to use it

Any time you are about to seek more than one vendor for a purchase of real consequence — enough money or enough risk that the method of choosing matters. Decide the method before requesting proposals, so the criteria aren't quietly reshaped by whoever happens to respond first.

When to avoid it

For a small, low-risk purchase, naming a formal selection method is theatre — pick a vendor you trust and move on. It is also the wrong technique to reach for once proposals are already in hand: at that point you are evaluating, not selecting a method, and pretending otherwise lets the method get reverse-engineered to fit whichever proposal you already like.

Steps

1. Identify what actually varies across likely vendors for this purchase: price only, qualifications, quality, or some mix.
2. Pick the method that fits: lowest cost for a commodity purchase where quality is uniform; qualifications-only when the work is too specialised to price-compare sensibly; quality-and-cost-based when both matter and you can weigh them; sole source when only one vendor can plausibly do the work and a competition would be theatre, not diligence.
3. Record the chosen method and the reason for it before any vendor is contacted.
4. Use that method to shape what you ask vendors for — a quality-and-cost method needs a proposal, a lowest-cost method just needs a price.

What it produces

• A named selection method and the reason it fits this purchase

Common pitfalls

• Choosing 'lowest cost' for work where quality varies enormously between vendors, then being surprised when the cheapest bidder delivers the least.
• Declaring sole source out of convenience rather than because only one vendor can actually do the work — sole source is a finding, not a shortcut.
• Picking the method after seeing who is available, so the method is really just a justification for a vendor already chosen informally.

Worked example

A nonprofit needs a video producer for a single fundraising event. Because the creative quality of the final video matters more than shaving a few hundred dollars off the price, the project lead selects a quality-and-cost-based method before reaching out to anyone, rather than defaulting to lowest cost, which would optimise for the wrong thing.

Source

• PMBOK-6 §12.1.2

Where it comes from: this technique is named by the PMBOK Guide, 6th edition.