[consulting] "How to write a RFP"

[Boerland, Bert]

-----Original Message-----
From: consulting-bounces at drupal.org

> Yeah, but how do you explain to people that they should pay your time 
> for doing this?

I have been dealing a lot with other RFP/RFI's then most of you do I am afraid. Mostly big outsouring all infra/network/apps/desktops etc for thousands of users and hunderds of servers. But the same principle holds up:

* writing a good rfp is an art
* answering a RFP is martial art
* paying a specialized agency to help you write the RFP and help you in the process, pays of
* RFP's are too narrow (i call it functionality 1.5 SP2). "vendor name must start with 'M' and and with 'oft'"
* RFP's are to broad ("site must use AJAX")
* RFP's are too technical ("all screws must be turned clockwise")
* RFP's are oversized ("we forsee the site to be in the top100 ranking within 1 week")
* RFP's budget is undersized ("we want Google search quality internal for a budget of 1/1.000.000.000.000 of Google")
* RFP's are often RFI's, most RFI's are in fact RFP's
* RFP's are too 127.0.0.1 ("hey this module looks nice and works on my laptop, lets ask that")
* RFP's for outsouring are too "now minded". How innovation in time is brought in to the service is higly underrated
* RFP's in The Netherlands (esp when dealing with European law, hence goverments) will in the end make the branche less transparant and price-ing agreements between agencys is bound to happen
* (The cost of answering RFP * the probability of winning * 10% profit) will be paid by the customer in the end
* The criteria for RFP's seldom take into account ordinal scale or interval scale but mostly use ratio scaling.
* The criteria of RFP's seldom do Multi Criteria Analytics
* RFP's arent won with paper but by playing golf
* RFP's arent lost by playing golf but with paper

Just something we have to deal with this I am afraid. Having said that I have done dozens of RFP's (on both sites, writing and aswering) and as said, the scope may be different but the priciples are the same. Within one month I'll publish such a doc and share it with you to let it grow from there. I will start with general stuff (outtasking), some CMS/webhosting stuff and maybe later some Drupal related questions which are most relevant for you.