Do you work in procurement?  Do you on occasion work with procurement to develop, say, a request for proposal (RFP)?

Then you’re in the right place!

This series asks you to think more carefully about your procurement documents.  It’s about helping you to produce a better product that results in the best possible solution or service for your organisation.

In this last part of my Love me, tender series,  I attack … I mean, I cast a critical eye over the response requirements for procurement documents. 

By ‘response requirements’ I mean the content you expect from a service provider to demonstrate they’re right for the job, and how you want that content to be presented.

Read my three final tips for procument document writers.

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?

It’s essential that you consider how service providers will interpret and use your procurement documents.

With timeframes to meet and the effort required to get tenders out the door, the less confusion for service providers, the better. After all, service providers are the primary audience of your document.

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.