RFP's and why agencies hate them

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And why RFP's are evil things,"

Having just finished up a number of RFP's over the past week I am at a loss as to why companies/governments/NGO's keep writing these things in a manner that is almost guaranteed to get them the wrong agency. 

Some of the issues:

Let be fair... 
Case in point:  If any proponent asks a question about the RFP then each proponent will receive a copy of that question and the answer.  Isn't part of the equation in any problem solving exercise knowing what questions to ask?  If your opponent didn't think of it, they deserve to lose.

The RFP authors spend pages talking around their issue and basically how they would like to solve it.  Why hire an agency at all - do it yourself if you don't want a solution. What they should be doing is posing the problem and challenging the agencies to come up with a solution. Tell us a bit about yourself and what your objectives are.

And what's with this penchant for holding back financial information?  You obviously have a budget for the project - tell us.  If it's not enough we likely won't bid - saving your time and ours.  If it is enough then its up to us to make a value proposition that you like better than the other guy. But to make us guess means you don't get the benefit of a well thought out response.

The idea of going to tender is to get the best possible supplier with the best solution.  Iit is not to send out something that actually wastes time because it's poorly written, not thought out and obvious that the author(s) don't know what they want.

And let talk about deadlines.  Is there a reason you feel that agencies can drop all their paying work to submit an RFP in one or two weeks time. It's not a speed contest and if this is your way of testing your agency, then you shouldn't be in the tendering business.  But I also know that often this ridiculous deadline penchant stems from someone inside the organization letting the document sit on their desk for a few weeks but no one thinks that maybe the deadline should be extended.  Duh?

Oh, one other thing, if, as is done on almost every government RFP, you are going to cut and paste from previous tender documents make sure you read it over before posting it.  I cannot begin to recall how many RFP's I have downloaded or picked up that were filled with conflicts, redundancy and sometimes just babble because they were not read over before they were sent out.

the tendering process should be your way to get the best profesionals working for you.  not a ay to make sure the agencies jump through hoops, stay iup all night and rush to deadline because you tender was not given the consideration it should have received when you wrote it.

Please have any response to the post back to me by 3:30 tomorrow, in triplicate, with CD enclosed and double spaced, no more that 24 1/2 pages.

Comments

[Stephanie]

Testify!

The unfortunate part about it all is that the only time you have enough information to know if a company or department needs to be schooled on their tendering approach is when you're vying for their business! This happens to be probably the worst time to offer what we would consider 'constructive criticism' but what they would likely view as 'failing the test.'

[jeff white]

A number of us discussed the failings of the RFP process when the last NSRSO tender came out a few weeks back. Ultimately, it was a simple document to produce, but the level of understanding required just to discern what was expected of us was ridiculous.

Last week a colleague of mine received an invite to pitch on an Annual Report. He got it Thursday. The document was due today! Unreal.

The best proposals I've written are the ones where we completely ignore all the requested boilerplate and provide the solution the client needs, not what they asked for. I've never lost an RFP when completed in this way.