Business Analysis in COTS environment: Evaluating COTS Products

This is going to be a quick post, I was asked by a reader on best practices that Business Analyst can use to evaluate COTS products. Following was my response:

Business Analyst role in COTS analysis is often undermined and not given due importance. What I have seen is that, the days of fresh developments project, where an application or a business solution is build right from the scratch is over, IT managers look for tools which can "best fit" the business needs and have a warranty associated with it.
Having said that, here is what I think a BA need to do in order to evaluate COTS products:

1. Understand and gatherbusiness requirements very well. This is the first step. What business problem are we trying to solve? What the business is trying to achieve? What are the high level requrements or the desired funtionality? These kinds of questions..which will give an idea of the length and breath of the field that has to be covered.
2. Make sure that these requirements reflect the need rather than the solution .
3. Categories requirements based on the priority(first) and then on the similiar feature groups. Example: wokflow requirements can be categoriesed together... so can be admin and editing realted requirements.
4. The selected vedor(based on the prices, feature match, support etc.) can be asked to demo the product, do a pilot(implement top 5 features in a sandbox environment which has end user access) ...this will help in selecting the right vendor.
5. Prepare a evaluation sheet..for example features with their quantitative weights, mapped with the scores of the various vendors and their product. The final score can be used to judge the best fit product. Gartner publishes some really good evaluation matrix..check those to prepare the evaluation sheet. This is a critical excercise and will be crucial for building the final evaluation report.
6. Always, have a technical analyst, project manager and business users representative as stakeholders in your analysis. Communicate with them, make them the part of the demo..do the scoring with them and faciliate them with the decision making process.
7. The COTS tool will never be a complete fit there will be changes in the requirements to fit the tool and some change in the tool to fit the requirements. Ask how customizable is the tool, ideally, if the tool fits 80% of the requirements... it is good enough.
8. Don't encourage too much customization the vendor will always say that everything can be done OOB or can be coded, make the business understand that customization will only add to their administrative cost in the future.
9. Prepare an analysis approach which is best fit for your business need. :)

What do you think additionally a BA should keep in mind while evaluating COTS products?