Your customer has a specific challenge and wants to have it solved by means of software. They ask you as a software/solution architect to advise them on this topic and they want to be able to choose a solution based on your advise by the end of next week (we're not talking about something as large as a government tender). How can you approach this challenge? When using a formalized approach, although usually thorough, you will probably not make it by next week and thus you are forced to make some shortcuts.
It boils down to establishing a set of prioritized requirements and evaluating them against potential solutions. In this blog post I'll provide a general outline of a 'quick and dirty' (not so formal) product selection process which can be done relatively quickly. I'll start with identification and classification of stakeholders. Next I'll suggest several topics to talk to the stakeholders about in order to determine and prioritize requirements. Ending with several suggestions on how to obtain possible candidates for the solution and compare them.
Disclaimer
There is probably overlap with existing approaches to accomplish the same. Please inform me so I can cross check this, learn and add references. I've used CMMI-DEV as an inspiration among others. The below approach is not a company standard. It is an approach I've personally tried and have good experiences with.
