I have had to hire a large number of temporary resources as part of a project. These resources were provided by third party professional services organisations, and were required to work alongside my employer's technical staff. The only criteria for selecting the suppliers was cost, and this was not open to debate (this decision was taken before I was engaged on the project, and I was obliged to accept it).
The project has progressed reasonably well, despite a few wobbles along the way, and I am now starting to think about documenting some "lessons learned". One area that I want to focus on is the criteria for selecting the suppliers of these external resources.
I don't want to focus in on the individuals who were taken on, but I do want to look at the decision making that led to the service companies being selected.
What would be effective ways to select these companies apart from cost? - recognising that the cheapest may only be cheapest because they provide lower grade resources, or fail to provide effective back-up services when things go wrong.