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June 15, 2005
This is What Happens...
when you don't take sufficient time to review and analyze an RFP. First, you scurry around trying to get organized to prepare your proposal. You have meetings, you gather information, you get people started on doing some assigned tasks. Second, you start putting your proposal together, spending a considerable amount of time and money, including perhaps, money for a consultant. Third, during proposal preparation, some of the people working on the cost and technical proposals spot some things in the RFP that raise some questions and red flags. Fourth, you hold some meetings to discuss the flagged items and decide -- with only a week to go before the due date -- that you can't make the bid because you didn't read the RFP carefully enough. Fifth, everything comes to a screeching halt.
That's what happened to me this week. I had started working on a 75-page technical proposal for a client who had contacted me the previous week. My client was very excited about the project because it seemed to be right up their alley. They got so excited about it that they didn't prepare well, although I wasn't aware of this when I began work. And it didn't help things any that they didn't really get started until a couple of weeks before the due date. But when their financial person began work on the cost proposal two days ago, he realized that the RFP was lacking some important information that he felt he needed. This, in turn, led to some other questions and concerns. An internal meeting was held to discuss these issues, and following that meeting, my client contacted me and told me to stop work.
The sad part about this whole thing is that it could have been avoided. Many of the questions/concerns they had were fairly obvious ones that could have been identified earlier on. Problem-solving could have taken place, approaches and alternatives could have been discussed, questions could have been submitted to the Contracting Officer, and so on. But none of this happened because the RFP wasn't carefully reviewed at the outset.
Diving into an RFP without doing your homework just doesn't make sense.
Posted by Deborah at June 15, 2005 06:01 AM
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