Apr 8

WRITTEN BY: Mark Scott
Thursday, 8 April 2010 

Do you get lots of requests for clarification to your RFPs and other procurement documents? Do you receive responses with varying content and levels of detail that make comparison difficult? These are measures of how clear your procurement documents are.

The question is: how can you make them clearer?

In part 2 of this series, I mentioned the importance of considering your primary audience, ie. those pesky service providers. And you’ve probably noticed that my tips for improving your RFPs and other procurement documents, so far, have really been about following good documentation practice. Well, this week I have three more tips … which just happen to be about considering your audience and following good documentation practice!

1.  Beware of using a previous document as the basis for a new one.

I think it’s safe to assume that copying an old document to create a new one is pretty common practice. Well, it makes sense … if the document was a good one. But there’s nothing worse than propagating garbage, and that’s pretty common practice too.

Anyway, global search-and-replace makes it easy to update names, titles, dates, system names and other bits and pieces in your RFP, right? Wrong! Global search-and-replace works fine … as long as words and terms were used consistently in the document you copied. You still need to read the content to ensure everything you intended was correctly replaced and to pick up anything that shouldn’t have been replaced. It happens, which leads me to my second tip.

2.  Check your document before releasing it.

‘That’s just common sense,’ I hear you say. ‘Well, you know what they say about common sense!’ I reply.

It’s quite frustrating being referred to section 3.12 of an RFP, only to find there is no such section because you deleted it, but you didn’t delete cross-references to it. And it’s just plain silly being instructed to comply with an Australian or international standard that’s obsolete or superseded (good-bye AS/NZS 4360, hello ISO 31000).

The solution here is simple: read your document—every word of it. Check cross-references (and ensure you update them first if you’ve used an automated cross-referencing function). Verify the currency of standards and other referenced material.

And have the document reviewed by someone who wasn’t involved in writing it.

Oh, and it’s probably a good idea to properly accept any tracked changes before you release the document. Seriously, I’ve seen more than one RFP* where the tracked changes were visible! And that reminds me, remember to delete any instructions that are in your RFP template … I’ve seen them left in released documents*, too. They were even coloured to stand out.

Finally, because it can’t be said often enough, my third tip this week is …

3.  Know your audience and speak their language.

I’m not talking about the tone of your documents or about using correct spelling and grammar—although that helps. I’m talking about making sure you use terminology and write in a way that your audience will understand you.

I remember seeing an RFP* that requested services to develop a ‘conceptual high level’ network design. That obviously made sense to the organisation from its electrical-engineering perspective. But from our ICT perspective, the spec was for a detailed network design. What’s more, my colleagues assure me that conceptual and high-level network designs are two different things.

And there’s nothing worse than those RFPs* that request you to provide a project plan when very clearly a schedule in a Gantt chart is what’s expected. You see, ‘project plan’ has a specific meaning to those of us using project methodologies like PRINCE2. (Although at Frame, we use ‘project management plan’ to avoid any confusion.)

By the way, it might help to ensure your EOI is actually an EOI. There’s a considerable difference in the level of detail and effort required to respond to an EOI compared to, say, an RFT. If you’re not sure of the difference between an RFI and EOI and RFP and RFT etc., then it’s probably a good idea to find out.

Just briefly to address your spelling and grammar, here’s a tip: use a dictionary and have someone proofread your content. Definitely do not rely on a spellchecker. They don’t pack up valid works used incorrectly.

And remember, you’re aiming for plain English in order to be understood—so that probably means not letting your legal team or techos have the final say on any of the wording in your procurement documents.

Next time, Love me, tender, part 4: it’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to.

* Names have been withheld to protect the guilty.