14 Ways You Can Tell If An RFP Is Wired

14 Ways You Can Tell If An RFP Is Wired For Someone Else – 3Forward published an interesting article discussing how you can determine if an RFP is rigged or wired. This sales organisation perspective may provide an interesting insight for many purchasers which could be useful when constructing an RFP document. Here are the points they raise:

Emphasis on evaluation criteria that only an incumbent will be able to get top marks in. For example experience of the staff being bid with obscure or customer specific tools. Overemphasis on the relevance of experience might be another.
Emphasis on criteria that are easy to bias. Risk mitigation and quality are good examples.
Prohibitions against contacting or rehiring incumbent staff.
Unusual labeling of key staff. If all of the staff are considered key and resumes are required for all staff being bid it’s a bad sign.
Evaluation practices that are outside the norm for that agency. If pricing is normally evaluated at 40% and on this RFP it’s being evaluated at 10% you have to wonder why. But this also requires you to know what the norms and trends are for that customer.
Use of multiple evaluation criteria to address the same thing. For example, requiring that past performance projects include the staff being bid so that in essence staffing is getting counted twice (and acceptable past performance is hard to find). When combined these can make one particular element count out of proportion.
Short, inflexible deadlines. On its own it doesn’t mean much, but it can favor a contractor who is expecting the bid.
Ambiguity that favors an incumbent. For example, requirement to supply custom software without the requirements being defined. Scopes that aren’t defined. Deliverables that are named, but not described. Statements of Work that require you to know the customer’s undocumented standard operating procedures.
So much detail that it’s overwhelming.
Page limitations that make it impossible to respond to all of the requirements so that only the preferred bidder will know what to focus on and what they can skip without being branded “non-compliant.”
Fixed price proposals where you don’t have enough information to know how long things will take.
Unusually brief responses to questions, especially when there are only a handful of bidders or when they are unresponsive to questions they could easily answer.
Unusually lengthy answers to questions, often delivered at the last minute without an extension.
“Processes” specified in the RFP that can’t be mapped or flow charted so that only someone who has experience with them can figure out how they work.

In our opinion many less developed procurement functions will fall into many of these categories unaware of the messages they send to prospective bidders. These procurement organisations rely on incumbent suppliers for specifications because they do not know their own requirements as well as the incumbent supplier. In these situations, whilst there may be some within the buying organisation who would welcome a change of vendor – inertia, risk aversion and general fear of change, favours the incumbent supplier.

Prospective bidders should seek those within the procurement function in favour of change and seek to balance the odds.

The procurement functions concerned should focus on building capability and support internally.

Nuff said …

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