In defining the product/service category for evaluation, the analyst first identifies the leading usage scenarios for the products/services in this market. What needs are end users looking to fulfill when considering products/services in this market? The analyst models all of the common client deployment scenarios. The analyst will then combine some scenarios and eliminate less significant ones to be left with between three and seven distinct client scenarios that define the use cases for the specific market.

Our methodology requires the analyst to then identify the “critical capabilities” for a class of products or services. These are attributes that differentiate products and services in a class in terms of their quality and performance. The critical capabilities will typically form a small subset or a grouping of the features commonly required by this class of products and services, not the entire range of capabilities that could be assessed. The analyst has to establish which capabilities form the most important criteria for acquisition decisions for the defined usage scenarios. These “critical” capabilities should be distinct from the multitude of important criteria that would be common across all usage scenarios, but that offer little differentiation. Some capabilities may be defined further to emphasize the differentiating factors of the capability and remove the assessment of important (but ever-present) baseline functionality. Each capability will be more or less important to every use case defined, which is represented by its weighting.