This video is aimed at stakeholders who are planning or writing an RFP (Request for Proposal) and would like some guidance on putting one together or evaluating the responses.
You can also access by click the link here.
See below for the transcript.
Penny Pullan
Hi, I’m Penny Pullan, and I’m here with Helen Winter. Helen is an author and consultant who has both written RFP requests for proposals, but also been involved in responding to them over many years. And she’s going to take a bit of time today just to help you. If you’re about to write an RFP or in the middle of it, then her insights should be really useful for you. So, Helen, tell us a little bit more about your involvement in the RFP process.
Helen Winter
OK, so I’ve written many RFP’s for companies and have also responded to them as well. So there is there’s certain things I’ve learnt when writing off RFP’s where you want to be able to at the end of it, you want to be able to understand which is the best vendor for the service or product that you’re asking for and what are the major headaches is you can write an RFP and then when you get all the responses, it’s then how do you work out which is the best one?
Helen Winter
How do you make sure that the process is fair, that you’ve got clear evaluation criteria and that you can compare like for like. And that’s one of the biggest problems that I’ve found, especially when I respond to RFP’s, is that sometimes you can tell the companies that are more experienced and those that aren’t, because you just know that the way they’ve done it, whether they’re gonna find it easy to make a decision from it. So that is one of the things I’ve written about in my book.
Helen Winter
One of the things that I offer is the service, because you know what? You’ve got that experience and understand what the pitfalls and what to avoid. It makes it a lot, lot easier, because that’s one of the things you get a lot of people that are really invested into wanting to make sure they’ve got the best product and service. And it can be very difficult, especially when you’ve got people in different teams that have different opinions. And how do you bring it together to get an objective decision or decision that you can actually justify?
Helen Winter
And then and that’s the biggest problems I think that people have.
Penny Pullan
So essentially, is that the purpose of an RFP and why you have one to get get that really clear?
Helen Winter
Yes, so it’s a it’s to make sure that you you’re clearly articulate what you want, the response for companies to respond to and also to make sure you know what your evaluation criteria is so that you know how you’re going to pick, is it purely based on cost? Is it based on your relationship that you have with the vendor, how easy they are to work with? Is it going to be based on? Can they meet all of your requirements?
Helen Winter
There’s a whole host of things. Sometimes there could be several vendors that can meet all of your requirements. And what do you do then? You know what? What’s going to be important to you? So so, yeah, it’s making sure that if you do go about in a certain way, what are the best techniques that I’ve found is to make sure that you give you ask for vendors to respond in the same formats. So best technique I’ve found is by asking give them the information so they know what the requirements are, but asking them all exactly the same questions and asking them to respond to exactly the same questions, because then that makes it a lot easier to compare the vendors.
Helen Winter
What are the things I’ve noticed is sometimes they decide just just right I response and they don’t give you any format at all. And I just feel so sorry for the people that they’re going to try mark it because it’s just going to be so, so difficult where, you know, if you get everybody to respond for every single question, you can then make sure that you can compare. And then the other thing is to give each question a weighting.
Helen Winter
If you’re writing an RFP, decide to your evaluation teams who are going to make that decision on who gets who to pick. Make sure you get the evaluation team organised in advance meetings set up in advance so that they can actually run with it. So another common scenario I’ve come across is that you get companies say they will do it by these really aggressive dates, but then they can’t because they haven’t taken into account that their key decision makers have got away for two weeks.
Helen Winter
So it’s important that, you know, who is going to be my evaluation team, get the meetings, the calendar in advance, get people agree to come to them and get people to agree in advance the weighting for each of the questions you want answered. So some things are going to be more important to you than others. So if you can do those things in advance, you’re just going to the process so much easier
Penny Pullan
And fairer, because if you do it later on, then you probably have a you know, people might have an idea of the one they want. And that could skew everything, couldn’t it?
Helen Winter
Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that often happens, and sometimes what you find is the situation I was in years ago where the management had a very, very firm idea of who they wanted and then people that were going to be dealing direct with the vendor. They had an idea of who they didn’t want because they said their relationship with them is terrible. How do we persuade the management that we can go somewhere else we could get a better relationship with?
Helen Winter
And I was able to put that in the evaluation criteria and I was able to sort of, you know, look at the weightings for it and actually get them to articulate in their scoring and so it enabled them to be happy in the end, because they they the people could couldn’t, you know, it was really, really black and white. Then where is the problem? We had to start it was how are we with how we’re going to show prove to some of the management that we think that we shouldn’t use this particular party. By having that criteria written down and been able to clearly articulate the rationale in the reasoning made a difference.
Penny Pullan
So having a clear RFP is really important. So what’s the process that you use to write an RFP?
Helen Winter
So finding out the big thing is finding out how to what vendors that we can would actually want to respond to your RFP, it’s finding putting those names out, sometimes that can be quite difficult. I know the public sector quite often advertised through certain portals, private sector sometimes seen in terms of just trying to find the types of companies that might be interested, I know the company I worked at, they just had four major companies that they always went to and they would ever consider recommendations.
Helen Winter
So procurement quite often has their own sort of policies to use. And then when writing the RFP, then it’s making sure that what questions you want to do or ask. Non Functional requirements are really, really important, because sometimes functionality wise, all the vendors might do the same thing, but it’s usually you’re non-functional that will really differentiate people and what services that you actually want. You also want to include hosting or support and just making sure you’ve got really, really clear all the different things you want the vendors to do and what your time scales want them to be.
Helen Winter
Phrasing things more like questions. Don’t give too much away, but make sure you understand what you look for. So, for example, you might ask what their project methodology is. And if your company has got a particular project methodology, then it makes it clear that if if they responded, it doesn’t match with your own. That’s the easier thing to compare. So they are all the types of things. When you are writing the RFP I always do the evaluation criteria at the same time. Obviously I don’t ever send this out, but you make sure you’ve got it in your back pocket.
Helen Winter
So, you know, when you get the answers that people know what’s important in advance you’ve got overweighting for it.
Penny Pullan
Makes it so much clearer, doesn’t it? So you’ve done all this work. You’ve come up with a really clever RFP. You’ve got your evaluation criteria up front. You sent it out to organisations. You’ve got lots of responses back. What are the best approaches that you found for evaluating those responses?
Helen Winter
So if you’ve structured it in terms of the way I was talking about before, in terms of what questions so normally I would put all of those those type of questions, I’d put them in the evaluation criteria to sort of show so you can compare each person can compare each answer and compare with the functional requirements. You know, I would list each one. And nobody would ask whether they fully meet it , partially meet it or don’t meet it. So you can score based on those.
Helen Winter
But it’s going through putting all the stuff down that was in the RFP into an Excel spreadsheet in terms of the criteria. And then you may have additional criteria, such as existing relationships with the vendor, you know, looking at the soft things that might be important, how easy these people to work with to work with them before, are they easy to deal with, will we get a relationship manager. How is their project methodology? What’s their escalations? What’s their change process?
Helen Winter
So are the things that might not necessarily be part of the functional requirements, but things around in terms of running, running the project when it gets going during the evaluation criteria, what are the big things that the evaluation is? Sometimes this comes into making sure you’ve got in your RFP is trying to make sure that everyone, if cost is important, try and get it so that people get forced into filling out a template. So they’re all the same.
Helen Winter
That’s one of the biggest headaches I’ve had when I’ve been evaluating RFP’s is trying to have I got the exact comparison between costs, because if you give if you give them different vendors, too much flexibility, you’ll get completely different ways of doing things. So it comes down to if you structured your RFP to be very specific in terms of how they fill out, it will really help with evaluating it. And it’s like I said before, make sure that you’ve got the evaluation team agreed upfront and the meetings booked in the calendar in advance.
Helen Winter
And then you may want to have as part of your process, you may want to have, the short list of vendors and get them to come back in and do presentations. And then you need to go and think about how you evaluate those presentations, what’s important. So those are the things which I suggest.
Penny Pullan
Brilliant.
Penny Pullan
And you can really tell that you’ve done this a lot before from what you’re saying. Absolutely. So Helen. How can people get in touch with you and find out more if they’d like to?
Helen Winter
So if people just want more information, I’ve written alot about writing RFP’s and the process in the business analysis handbook that I’ve written, so it’s a pretty good reference book. So I recommend that. If they need some help, and they want to get in touch with me. My business emails, Helen.Winter@Business Bullet.co.uk or they can connect with me on LinkedIn.
Penny Pullan
Thank you very much.
[End of transcript]
Thoughts? Questions? Please share in the comments.
If you have found this article useful then you might like my book – The Business Analysis Handbook – Techniques and Questions for better Business Outcomes. The book is available from www.koganpage.com and all major print and e-book retailers.
