Talking with one of our clients, he told us about their evaluation process and how they generated the RFP that they distributed to their suppliers. Our client acknowledged that the process had some problems and shared certain details with me. It is precisely those details that have motivated me to write this article for our Blog.
The goal is to show typical errors that arise when making considerations for creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) and to provide some high-level guidance that can help companies make a more accurate assessment.
When you are going to create your response request, one of the first things you think about is: I should find a neutral company to advise me on content creation. Here it is important to consider that if this is the path you are going to follow, you must make sure that the company you choose, in addition to being neutral, must have experience or personnel with experience in the implementation of projects of this nature. Otherwise, you are exposed to recommendations with very weak bases. For example, imagine that you require an eye operation and a urologist offers his services. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't let anyone other than an ophthalmologist treat me, much less a urologist, not if you know what I mean.
Here are four tips that can assist you when preparing it:
- To create the RFP, hire a company that is neutral, but has experience in the matter. As alternatives, consider research and market companies, gather information from the different providers, and use your common sense to find out which ones apply to the particular case of your company.
- Consider requesting in the RFP to carry out a proof of concept (POC), with defined minimum requirements for all suppliers, so that you can evaluate pears to pears, and apples to apples. Our client requested a POC from a single vendor, so the assessment revealed significant gaps and hid features of other solutions.
- If you are from the IT area, find a balance between the business requirements and the technical and administrative requirements of the solution. It often happens that the IT area only focuses on what the business asks for; or vice versa, only IT's point of view is taken. In the first case, there is a risk that the solutions will demand a large amount of resources to manage and operate, raising the total cost of ownership. In the second case, the possibility that the end user simply does not use the selected platform remains latent.
- To get vendor commitment, share as much information about your project and needs as possible with them. Also, establish an evaluation, decision-making and project initiation schedule. This increases the quality of the proposals that you will receive.
While it is true, although this information is based on the experience of a client when requesting proposals for a Business Intelligence project, it is clear that it applies to other types of software implementation.