How about Those Commercial and US Government RFPs?
April 7, 2022
I am not familiar with an author whose name I will not put in my blog because of the Google-type systems’ stop word lists. The article is called “Your Competitor Wrote the RFP You Are Bidding On.” Some of the people who have worked on commercial bids are familiar with the process: Read the request for proposal, write the proposal, and win the proposal. Simple, eh. I have more familiarity with the swamp lands in Washington, DC. I have had an opportunity to observe how the sausage is made with regards to requests for information, requests for proposals, the proposals themselves, the decision mechanisms used to award a project, and the formal objections filed by bidders who did not win a contract. My observations are based on more than 50 years of work for government entities as well as some commercial projects for big outfits like the pre-Judge Green AT&T.
The write up states:
As a vendor, your job is to determine whether you want this. It’s costly to bid and often more costly to win. Spending absurd amounts of time across your org doing RFP submissions is rarely quantified from an ROI stand-point. If you’re in a type of business where RFP bids are involved from time to time, do your best to understand if it’s worth it. A typical RFP bid could take many hundreds of hours, from start to finish, especially if you progress past initial phases. Not only does this have easily quantifiable real costs, but the process also has runaway opportunity costs involving the product team, engineering, sales, legal and marketing.
I liked this observation:
The thing is, nobody really needs 80% of the [expletive deleted] that’s in an RFP, and they will never hold you to that. The implementation will take 3x longer than promised and your champions will no longer be with the company by the time you’re rolled-out anyway. By winning large RFP contracts, you will get buried, but not by the requirements you said Yes to. You’ll get buried trying to implement and retain this customer. Every week will be a new urgent requirement that was never covered in the RFP.
I want to point out that the reason the wordage and “wouldn’t it be nice” aspects of an RFP are included are often a result of inputs from consultants to the firm or the government agency. If these consultants have special skills, these will often be inserted into the RFP for the purpose of blocking competitors. There are other reasons too.
I look forward to more posts from so [expletive deleted] agile.
Stephen E Arnold, April 7, 2022
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