Is creating an RFP anyone’s favorite thing to do?
I suppose for some people it could be, but for most of us, putting together these documents are not typically the highpoint of the week. Requests for proposals, of course, do play a crucial role, as they lay the groundwork for a potential business relationship that will ideally result in both parties finding the relationship—and the correlating exchange of goods, services, and/or information—to be a beneficial one. But putting together an RFP can be an involved and thankless task; it’s only one of the many steps toward that eventual business relationship and work done, products acquired, services rendered, and so on.
The RFP process can be a time-consuming one, for both the company requesting the proposal and the vendor/service provider putting it together. Dozens of person-hours can easily be spent creating a single RFP, and vendors can spend as much, if not more, time going over the RFP and developing a proposal according to the specifications within.
The process can be frustrating one as well, particularly if expectations aren’t set properly up front. Most RFP processes are carried out in good faith; but sometimes, for example the company requesting the proposal doesn’t understand its needs well enough, so they ask every question they can think of and, consequently, overwhelm the vendor. Or they’re looking at the RFP process largely as an opportunity to deeply educate them-selves on the subject matter, taking advantage (often inadvertently) of the vendor’s re-sources.
So we've created an RFP template -- available for free here at the PSGroup Web site -- to limit both time and frustration and to make the process as easy as possible for all involved. You may not be able to produce all the information that we call out, but the more you can provide that’s relevant to your company and your context, the greater the potential for receiving high-quality bids. Along the way, you’ll also learn quite a bit about your organization’s capabilities and expectations, which will be valuable when you get your project started.
We have developed and published an Online Community Platform Evaluation Framework, which we invited you to use to compare vendor offerings. In our published research, we’ve applied this framework to the analysis of a number of vendor offerings, which are listed on our Web site (and include platforms from Jive Software, Leverage Software, Lithium Technologies, Telligent Systems, and others). Customers have also been very successful using this framework for product evaluation and selection. While the framework provides an important element of an RFP for an online community plat-form, it takes a very general perspective. Any useful RFP, of course, will need to be specific to your company and your particular situation. This template, which is based on our evaluation framework, can help you collect and present all the information that vendors need to prepare great bids specifically for you.
Finally, we can’t emphasize strongly enough that a yes/no checklist of requirements is not enough to evaluate a platform; you need to know how a platform satisfies each business and feature requirement, as well as what it is like for community members, internal stakeholders, members of the community management team (e.g., community manager, administrator, and moderator), and others to use the platform. To address this, the list of platform requirements is presented in matrix format. Functionality-related questions run down the left side, with a blank column on the right side to be filled in by the vendor. Just remove the questions, requirements, or rows that don’t relate to your situation. And if you come up with new questions we may have overlooked, please let us know. (Note that we also provide a version of the Evaluation Matrix as a standalone document, with three blank columns on the right side, thus allowing you to perform a detailed, side-by-side comparison of multiple plat-forms. This can be useful in getting to your short list of vendors. )
Good luck! (And let us know how things go...)
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