Mar 11

WRITTEN BY: Mark Scott
Thursday, 11 March 2010 

In part 1 of this series, I said to remember the golden rule for writing: consider your audience.  For procurement documents, that means you need to address the different needs of the service providers who will respond to your request, and of your internal team (or possibly consultants) who will evaluate the responses.

To address both of these needs, it’s essential for you to consider how service providers will interpret and use your document.  After all, they are the document’s primary audience.  And the quality of your request to them has a direct bearing on the quality of responses you’ll receive.

I’ve seen RFPs where Part A doesn’t mention what the request is for, and just launches into the conditions of tendering.  There are the ones where schedules to be completed and returned are in the middle of the document … a PDF document.  And it’s very frustrating when, within the same response schedule, most response requirements have space for answers to be provided, while other response requirements are stated without any indication of how or where the answers are to be included.

I remember an RFQ which explained how and where to lodge the response, neatly set out under the heading Lodgement of Offers.  But the closing date and time were buried in text three pages later.  That’s neither logical nor helpful from the services provider’s point of view.

I have written before about taking readers on a journey.  This is particularly important in complex documents like RFPs, RFTs, et al.  They require a well thought-out structure, where the information is logically grouped and response requirements are clearly and consistently stipulated.

Your organisation most likely uses a template to create procurement documents.  Now, I love templates, but they need to be developed with some forethought.

For example, your procurement templates have probably been developed to cover most, if not all, purchasing scenarios that your organisation may require.  That means the templates may include optional parts.  My advice is to put those optional parts at the end of the template with clear instructions for them to be deleted if not needed; that way they can be omitted without the need for renumbering.  There’s nothing worse than receiving an RFP that has Parts A–E, and Part D consists of one page with the words ‘not used’.

With timeframes to meet and the effort required to get these things out the door, the less confusion for service providers, the better.  (There’ll be more on this later in the series.)

While on the topic of templates, picture this: I arrive at a client to help put together an RFP, and I’m given the latest version of their template.  The version wasn’t 1.2 or 3.0 or anything standard like that … it was ‘latest version’.  Latest version!  This didn’t bode well for the rest of the document.

Thumbing through the template my concerns were realised and I knew I was in for a struggle with this client’s procurement team.  What I wanted to do was make the document as easy as possible for respondents to read, understand and use, and by doing so help the evaluation team with the task ahead of them.  I think my constant question of ‘what does this mean?’ (accompanied by a pained expression) eventually paid off—I was able to make wholesale changes to the document.  As it turns out I must have done something right because I was asked back to assist with other RFPs.

So, what I say to those of you responsible for putting together procurement documents is this: don’t be afraid to question the structure and wording of a template just because it’s the one that someone, at one time, decided was the right one for the organisation.  The people deciding such things might be procurement experts (or, if you’re really unlucky, lawyers), but they aren’t always documentation experts.  And besides, you’re the expert in knowing what you want to buy and how you’ll know that you’re buying the right one.

Remember, the primary audience of the document isn’t the procurement team (or those lawyers).  Sure, there has to be all sorts of stuff in the document that ensures a valid tendering process is explained and followed.  Just take care to write it and structure it in a way that benefits the document’s audience.

So, off you go; now is the perfect time to start a review of your procurement document templates.  And here’s a thought: why not ask people who have responded to your RFPs how easy they found them to read, understand and use … go on, I dare you.

Next time, Love me, tender, part 3: please, please me.