RFPs Will Kill Us All
bigbangtechnology.com
bigbangtechnology.com
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.
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.
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.
Not all the time. I never respond to public RFPs, and neither does the OP. Apparently in our (separate) niches, you can get by just fine.
Agree with your point about supply and demand, but good hackers are (nearly) always in demand, and so can nearly always find work. It's the strange outsourced companies that spend all their time searching for work that end up responding to RFPs, and that's dangerous even to clients.
Look at it this way: if you have a pool of proposals sitting on your desk, 90% of which are from firms that are simply incapable of doing the job[1], and you are a business/nontechnical chap, it's going to be difficult to find the 10% who are capable, let alone competent.
Meanwhile, technical guys who are good hackers but don't understand this see lots of firms sending out and responding to RFPs and think this is how it works, so I guess we have to do it too.
[1] http://www.elance.com/php/search/main/eolsearch.php?matchTyp...
We absolutely do respond to RFPs, when they're for projects we want to work on or clients we really want a relationship with. And we always spend serious otherwise-billable time on proposals, even though that's the same speculative work that this article argues against.
It's important to us to be easy to work with, because we want good projects. We don't want to confine ourselves to whatever lands in the margins of "unusually liberal clients"; those clients don't necessarily have the best projects.
I read the other post referenced on this thread, and so I'll add that being able to smoke out the bogus RFPs you shouldn't waste time responding to (because they indicate inept purchasers, or, for instance, because they probably mean the client is in the tank for another vendor) is just one of those things you need to be able to do to succeed as a consultant.
I would imagine that good clients in security/pentesting fields probably have well-written RFPs, so an RFP in a market like this would be a positive indicator for a client.
In contrast, for web and iPhone projects (what I've been doing lately), RFPs are a very strong negative indicator. I have yet to find a well-written iPhone RFP.
I am new to this RFP business.
On "real" RFPs, especially if you have a good shot, you'll find the purchaser you talk to is accomodating; they'll set aside time for calls to answer questions, and they'll do a good job with your Q&A submission (as a general rule, real RFPs have Q&A phases, though note that you never know whether your Q's are going to other vendors too).
There is an old negotiating trick a bizdev guy taught me once, which is, if you want to figure out whether a deal is real or whether the other side is just wanking, figure out a reason to schedule a meeting on a Saturday. If the deal is big and the other side is serious, they'll do it. Similar idea here, although less aggressive.
If your firm's way of handling the RFP process is to simply pick up the forms off some website, mail them in, and hope, then yes, I can see how the RFP process would upset you.
Personally, the only reason I'd ever recommend responding to [a public-sector] RFP is if it's a hoop you need to jump through in order to formalize a deal that's already been effectively struck.
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.
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.
I have seen one ridiculous "RFP" that a government agency up here put out recently in which they wanted potential vendors to essentially do 6-8 months worth of work and if they landed the project, they'd end up with a long term multi-year contract. We're talking tens of millions of dollars here, but still, that one struck me as quite the lottery and I'm pretty sure the only companies that responded to it were the big names consultancy firms.
EDIT: here's the results of that RFP...whaddaya know look which firms won the bid: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/October2009/21/c8...
Here's where posting anonymously is beneficial (but alas since it's anonymous, take my account with a grain of salt). My opinion is that a select few large IT companies in Canada have a virtual monopoly on all government work. In fact, the only reason that I was involved in these projects was because certain teams from these companies screwed up so badly that some bureaucrats formed a skunk works side project to move things along. There was an unspoken understanding that the government wouldn't sue and shake the boat, but that they'd screwed up badly and needed to let another party try to resolve the situation.
Pretty much the only way you're going to get access to government contracts is via sub-contracting for these firms. To bring this post back on topic, the reason that this happens is because in a bid to try to account for government spending, the government issues these RFPs that are so lengthy and cumbersome to accomplish that only the big companies can actually pull them off. But it's a premature optimization and means that the government spends more money than it needs to. It's not unheard of for a simple web application to have a budget of CDN$1M. This would be something that your typical YCombinator team could pull off in 3 months and US$17K.
Some of the more successful government projects that I've heard of are ones where you have a bureaucrat that hires acquaintances without an active bidding process, because they can vouch for their expertise. Stuff gets done quickly and correctly the first time because there's little red tape to work around. Unfortunately, eHealth involved friends hiring friends and stuff just not getting done. I always thought that the criticism of eHealth folks hiring people they knew was less of a concern than the fact they simply didn't get stuff done. I mean think about it, in the private sector do you get people to actively bid on every little position and project or do you have your go-to guys?
Anyways, my opinion is otherwise largely positive with government work here in Canada. They seem to spend more money than I think they would if they let smaller more agile companies into the fold more often. But stuff seems to get done and when it doesn't (e.g., eHealth) you hear about it. Most of the government people I've worked alongside care very much about their job and doing it well. It wasn't unheard of for them to reply to my off-hours questions on their Blackberries on a weekend. So all is not lost. If I'm a little bitter, it has to do with what I perceive to be a rigged RFP process that favours these big vendors.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I make this same observation every time the spec-work argument comes up (if you haven't picked up on it, I'm also not against spec-work):
When we were just getting started, lawyers from WSGR and another firm spent literally hours on the phone with us, for zero money and no promise of ever being compensated, presumably because the fact that they're willing to be that cool to work with costs them very little and makes them incredibly attractive in the long run.
I want to be like them.
I guess the main reason this works for us is that we prefer smaller projects. We don't aspire to being a huge consulting company / agency taking on bigger and bigger projects. We like working on small projects that grow into bigger things.
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).
I'm not sure of the background of the author, but RFPs are standard in a lot of domains.
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.
Another solution (for bigger companies) would be to fund smaller independent teams to consult as an acting external supplier.
http://www.ngenworks.com/blog/detail/from_the_archives_chapt...
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.
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.
"Most" RFPs are not rigged.
A company that submits 153 RFP responses and wins only 3 has a problem, and it isn't with the concept of RFPs. Perhaps their pricing is wildly out of whack. For awhile, there were things we did wrong with our proposals that cost us several RFPs. We figured them out, resolved them, and systematically improved our win rate.
There is no way that 1.9% (or even 5%) of RFPs are bogus.
Indeed, we call this "column fodder," ;-)
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.