Almost always in the public sector, and often in the private, medium to large scale projects for assessment, competency development or the like are the subject of Requests for Proposals (RFPs). Appropriate firms are invited to respond to the RFP, and the RFP may also be published so that others can review and decide whether to respond. It’s the same process that is used for other kinds of projects or services, and can be an efficient way to identify the best-qualified and most cost-effective vendors.
I’ve worked both sides of the RFP space — preparing RFPs, evaluating responses and selecting vendors, as well as responding to many dozens of RFPs while working as a consultant in HR and organizational psychology. I can say with considerable assurance that organizations don’t always use the process to their best advantage.
I’ve seen several kinds of problems with RFPs and related processes. Sometimes it looks like organizations are fishing for advice, putting out an RFP with very general parameters, with a view to using the responses to clarify their perspective on what needs to be done. Other times I’ve seen very disparate objectives and processes packaged together; firms are invited to respond to all or a subset of the RFP, but this strategy inevitably leads to very onerous response preparation, a cost that will end up being reflected (indirectly) in the financial proposal. And sometimes the evaluation criteria are unclear, leaving vendors uncertain as to just how to configure their proposal in order to meet the organization’s objectives.
My own recommendations for RFP preparation can be summarized like this:
- Spend more time than you think you should to arrive at clarity on just what you want to achieve through the project, the kinds of activities or services that you want, how you expect to measure success, how the bids will be evaluated, and so on. Capture this thinking as clearly as you can in the RFP. You’ll make the life of the vendors easier, and this won’t hurt the bottom line in the proposals.
- Avoid the temptation to lump disparate projects or service needs together in one RFP, unless they are clearly connected and there will be some benefit in engaging a single vendor for all of them. Where the projects are clearly separate, and especially where you expect to engage separate vendors, issue multiple RFPs. Nothing prevents a vendor from responding to more than one, but they can recycle some of the background information they put in the response and still stay focused on one set of services at a time.
- Work closely with your own procurement professionals, especially around response evaluation, ensuring that your organization’s standards and policies are appropriately reflected. In my experience, the procurement staff are often very skilled at setting up evaluation frameworks, enabling the HR staff to reach good decisions in a timely and effective manner.
- Be clear in the RFP just what kind of vendor you want to respond. If it’s essential that you have a vendor who can deliver large projects in multiple locations, make that clear. If your organization’s standards call for documentation of financial strength/history, say it. In HR projects, sometimes organizational standards for procurement risk management may be excessive (it’s not like the vendor is selling you heavy equipment, or constructing buildings). You may want to discuss with your procurement colleagues just what is really required, whether organizational defaults can be varied, and then make that clear in the RFP.
For larger and more complex projects, you might want to consider engaging a knowledgeable consultant to assist you in thinking through the issues and preparing the RFP itself, and possibly in evaluating the responses. This will cost some money, but not too much, and you will quite possibly recoup the cost through greater RFP precision and the assurance that a professional eye has been cast on the proposals. Of course, a consultant assisting you in this way will normally not be eligible to actually bid on the project.