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• Lack of Proper Development
• How to Develop Tenders and RFPs

When I was working for one client, who was looking for service providers for facilities management, one of the responses contained another company's name all the way through, rather than the name of my client. The provider had just re-issued an old proposal but forgot to change the name.

It is rare for providers to put together a proposal in such an unprofessional manner. Many proposals do contain standard parts, however. Often, a service provider will have a set of descriptions of components of its services, and it will use these in its proposals. These standard "boiler-plates" are usually used because they will create a good impression with the customer. They have often been honed over time so that they answer all the questions that most customers would have about the provider's services.

Lack of Proper Development

Often, the same approach is taken with tenders and RFPs. Especially with RFPs, customers will often use entire sections of previous RFPs. This can be done for a number of reasons:

1. The section of the previous RFP is entirely appropriate to the new RFP.
2. The customer has not analysed the situation to be covered by the new RFP but believes that it is the same as the previous one.
3. The customer cannot be bothered to work out what is really needed for the new RFP.
4. The customer has run out of time in preparing the new RFP.

The first of these is very rare. I have only found it to be really useful when providing standard information about the customer, its organization and its products.

The second reason is the one given by some customers when the third reason is actually the truth.

The fourth reason is too common. Often, customers get so involved in the detail for some sections of the RFP that they do not have enough time to complete other sections properly.

How to Develop Tenders and RFPs

The golden rules of developing tenders and RFPs are:

1. Start from the top and work down.
2. Run the development as a project.
3. Continually review the level of detail required.

Top-down Approach

The top-down approach ensures that the document addresses what really needs to be done. You should start at the strategic level, identifying the business objectives that will be met (even if only partially) by the services.

You can then work through the critical success factors to the functions that need to be supported. From now on, the development of the document will go down two tracks. The first track will work down from the business functions and their support. The second track will work down from the critical success factors and their achievement.

As with any top-down approach, there will be an emphasis on remaining within perimeters and excluding anything which goes beyond their scope.

Bottom-up approaches tend to have an emphasis on including rather than excluding, which is why they are less appropriate to developing tender and RFP documents.

Project Approach

Developing the document in a project approach means identifying milestones and aiming towards their completion.

This is an area in which you need to apply real project management techniques. There is a mistaken belief amongst some people who attempt to manage projects that they need to concentrate on completing tasks. Experienced project managers focus on reaching milestones.

It also means:

• prioritizing work and ensuring that the most important work receives all necessary resources for its completion
• making sure that all tasks will fit into the time available, and obtaining extra resources if they will not
• avoiding duplication, by determining the order of work and by using the outputs of some earlier tasks as inputs to later ones
• monitoring progress.

Level of Detail

A continual check needs to be kept on the level of detail being provided.

There is no point in describing the operation of your general ledger in detail when you are preparing a RFP for a financial software package.

There may be a great deal of value in providing detail about your staff, their work, and their daily patterns when you are planning to outsource your catering.

If something in your business is a "useful commodity", which is not crucial to meeting your business objectives nor gaining competitive edge, then there is probably little point in spending much time on it.

In outsourcing IT departments, I often run across very detailed descriptions of companies' current help desk operations. As one of the major reasons for outsourcing the help desk is to make it more effective, I am not convinced that those companies really do want the outsourcer to do it the way that they do it now themselves.