3/4 through this article I started wondering whether this was some kind of Swift-ian satire about the graphic design "spec work" argument. I don't think it is.<p>Here's the deal: it's called supply and demand. If clients have 10 quality firms to choose from, and they pay their firms enough, then building an excellent RFP is simply going to be the cost of doing business with them.<p>Sometimes, some firms are so good, and provide output that is so hard to match with any substitutable firm, that they get to set the terms for the client/vendor relationship. Those firms know who they are, because they have waitlists, and are already turning down clients.<p>If you want to boycott RFPs, by all means, get your lunch eaten by the companies who are willing to throw those two extra non-billable days at the task of making themselves extra easy to work with. But I don't think you're going to manage to demonize the RFP process the way designers have the spec-work process, because RFPs are simply the way consulting works.
I work for a publicly funded institution, in our jurisdiction we have to go through the RFP process. It is either an RFP (where we are allowed to do an evaluation of who "best" met the requirements - using a pre-defined scoring criteria) or a straight tender where we have to pick the lowest bid that meets the requirements.<p>I sympathize that it is very difficult to produce a proper response to an RFP, however as one who evaluates those responses let me tell you it is quickly evident which vendors spend the time to do so. It is also painful on the client side to prepare the criteria on which to fairly evaluate the responses.<p>It is an imperfect process and definitely more of an art than a science but the good news is that a well-defined RFP will often signal a client who understands their requirements.
Most consultancy firms that don't respond to RFPs eventually die. Of those firms that survive, they could be viewed as a collective of successful freelancers. There typically is not enough revenue to grow the company beyond the founding consultants because the project budgets that they deal with are typically $15K to $50K. You can definitely get away with not responding to RFPs if you're only ever dealing with budgets of tens of thousands of dollars. Also, an RFP is a way for customers to weed out the "I just quit my day job at an agency and started my own consulting company" firms. These customers want to deal with bigger firms because they expect these companies to be around for a while and provide support years down the road. A bigger company can afford to devote a few employees for a couple of weeks to address an RFP properly.
The article is well thought out and presents a good viewpoint. I think it's one-sided and, um, short-sighted.<p>I see the RFP process from the viewpoint of a buyer and a provider. From the buyer's standpoint, when we start a project we simply don't know what firms are capable of doing what we want done. The RFP gives us a level playing field to compare costs, capabilities, and experience.<p>Without an RFP, particularly for complex projects, you can spend months scoping out capbilities, refining your needs (both of which you should be doing AFTER you form a relationship.)<p>Which takes longer for a firm? Researching an RFP and presenting a document for a potential client's review or spending eight months going back and forth trying to figure out what to build. Of course, the latter. The difference is that providers get paid for those eight months (a plus for them) while buyers get nowhere.
Our approach is to respond to RFPs with a fixed-rate proposal development fee.<p>Anyone that's good enough to be in demand should do the same. Clients that expect you to do work for free will probably turn out to be difficult people to work with in the long term.
The normal way to solve this in government and big dumb companies (which issue RFPs) is to have one domain-specific expert firm awarded an RFP management contract, recusing itself from the actual implementation contract, which then specifies what will be in the RFP. Judging the proposals is a combination of the client and process-management contractor, and in some, the management contract manages the ongoing relationship with the contractor as well.<p>It's inefficient for best case (you have 2 contracts instead of one), but solves a lot of worst-case problems (bribery or incompetence leading to a rigged bidding process, companies awarding themselves contracts, or buying a perfect but wrong thing).<p>I'm not sure of the background of the author, but RFPs are standard in a lot of domains.
For the most part, I view the RFP as a way to encourage wrong and ill-fitting service providers or third party consultants to engage with your company or business. Simply put, an RFP is just a tick-a-box approach to seeking skills and services externally. The tick-a-box approach and mentality by it's nature sets up a very black and white context. This is the problem. Business for the most part is not purely objective.<p>A better approach I think, would to be more proactive and approach only those service providers or companies that are somewhat aligned with your business or company values and vision.<p>Another solution (for bigger companies) would be to fund smaller independent teams to consult as an acting external supplier.
Nice article, Max. Carl from nGen Works has an interesting post up of late on the same topic:<p><a href="http://www.ngenworks.com/blog/detail/from_the_archives_chapter_1_answering_rfps" rel="nofollow">http://www.ngenworks.com/blog/detail/from_the_archives_chapt...</a>
Mike Bosworth's two books Solution Selling and CustomerCentric Selling talk a bit about RFP/RFQ's.<p>The authors note that most RF[PQ]'s are prewired and biased towards a preferred vendor. The client gives out the RF[PQ] so the client can say it was properly competed for so it can pass the approval process in upper management. If you are not that preferred vendor who was there from day one, you will most likely not win.<p>The author cites one anecdote of a big company that has a separate department that only handles RF[PQ]s. One day they decided to take some metrics over a time period. Out of that time period, they submitted 153 bids to unsolicited RF[PQ]s ... only won 3.
In case anyone's wondering, RFP (probably) stands for Request for Proposal<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_proposal" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_proposal</a>
Hmm, this perspective seems to ignore growing services like InnoCentive and Aardvark to connect people with knowledge to buyers. I'm not sure about the pricing equilibriums in play, and I'm not sure about the relevance to RFPs. Am I relating two frameworks that shouldn't be?
hm. well, personally, I find 'relationships' in business usually raise costs. How to get around this? I don't know.<p>You could simply only buy commodities. If this is possible, it is clearly the best answer. However consulting isn't a commodity, and neither is design work. it seems that making it a commodity is a 'hard problem' - RFPs are one attempt to treat consulting as a commodity, and they are obviously imperfect.