Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) applications are a part of most (perhaps every) medium to large enterprises. A lot of money is spent every year in selection and implementation projects of such applications – think millions to billions of dollars if you consider lost opportunity costs (which are hard to measure). Unfortunately, buying instead of building is no guarantee of success. Tales of monumental package implementation overruns and disappointing functionality – not to mention outright failures – abound. These failures occur despite elaborate, detailed evaluation processes meant to select just the right package and reduce the risk of implementation. It is clear that businesses have to get better at researching, evaluating, and selecting software products. In this talk we’ll describe an approach to selecting and implementing package software that focuses on engineering quality and business agility. We prefer an approach that involves hands-on, experiential hypothesis testing and evidence gathering over endless feature checklists and vendor demonstrations.