Feb 11

WRITTEN BY: Mark Scott
Thursday, 11 February 2010 

Given the cost of developing procurement documents, organisations need to take care to achieve the best possible outcome. Just look at what’s at stake: the commitment to a solution or service, with its associated—and potentially large—financial transaction, contract period and changes to business operations.

When I say ‘procurement documents’ I’m talking about RFPs, RFQs, RFTs, RFIs, EOIs, ITBs, ROIs, ITRs, ITOs, ITTs … you see, they come in many flavours and all have different purposes … although the way I’ve seen them used indicates their names and uses are open to interpretation. And that’s just one issue with them.

Whether writing them or responding to them, these documents can be a bother (that’s a polite way of putting it).

The main issue is that they’re often written with scant consideration for the people who are going to respond to them or the people who will evaluate them—and the latter group quite often includes the authors themselves!

Okay, I guess I need to explain that wild accusation.

If you read my blog, you’ve probably gathered I’m a proponent of writing good quality documentation … always. And remember the golden rule for writing: consider your audience. You may forget about your documents’ readers most of the time (naughty you), but this is one time you can’t afford not to think about them. Like I said, just look at what’s at stake.

The procurement document (or suite of documents) is one that is guaranteed to be read and re-read, with each section pored over by members of multiple bid teams. You need to be crystal clear about what you’re asking for, how you specify it, how you explain what you want from respondents, and how you describe (or provide) the way that information is to be presented. I’ll go out on a limb and say, at least one of these aspects (sometimes all of them) is not addressed very well (I’m being polite again) in the many procurement documents that I’ve seen.

I’ve spent thousands of hours on proposals, at times of night when I’d rather be sleeping and on weekends when I’d rather be relaxing. Hey, that’s the nature of business (and I’ll have a moan about it), and I’m sure many of you that work for service providers have done the same (spent the hours, that is … and perhaps had a moan about it, too).

I, and my Frame colleagues, have also been on the other side of the process. We’ve been involved in everything from writing technical specifications for inclusion in procurement documents, to managing the entire process on behalf of a client: gathering the requirements, developing and issuing the request, evaluating the responses, making a recommendation to the selection committee, and assisting with final negotiations. We’ve done it for government and private enterprises—big and small—and some of these have been multimillion-dollar deals.

There’s no doubt this process often provides the most efficient and effective way to source a solution or service. But it’s a costly exercise, in time and money, for the organisation making the request and the organisations responding to it.

There can be many challenges involved as these are complex documents with business and technical content being provided by multiple parts of an organisation. It usually means additional demands on valuable operations staff, and it means negotiating the different needs of commercial and technical teams.

So, based on this experience, and because I don’t just rant about things, the Love me, tender series will give you some helpful suggestions for improving your (yes, your) procurement documents ... with more moaning guaranteed. There’ll be two or three more parts, so stay tuned.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, here’s the full names of the shortened forms mentioned above:

RFP	request for proposal
RFQ	request for quotation
RFT	request for tender
RFI	request for information
EOI	(calls for) expression of interest
ITB	invitation to bid
ROI	(calls for) registration of interest
ITR	invitation to register interest
ITO	invitation to offer
ITT	invitation to tender