RFP vs Contract requirements

I'm about to start another Procurement & Contract Management course 210 (Understanding and drafting contracts). As I've been teaching this course nearly two years now, I have seen a trend of common errors made on assignments. In one particular exercise, learners are to write criteria for an RFP to avoid "problems of last year". This is something, as a buyer, most of us have had to do. We draft RFPs based upon needs, specifications, etc, but we also inherit projects that "failed" and need to 'fix' what went wrong.

What tends to be common, is listing 'future requirements' of the contract. It is one thing to ask for qualified personnel, and expect the proposal to demonstrate experience and qualifications, it is another to require 'must engage all stakeholders', to which a vendor responds "yes, we will" and meets the requirement! A better method for managing this future requirement would be to ask for demonstrated experience in engaging stakeholders, or ask for 'how' they will engage stakeholders in the process.

Essentially, everything in the RFP is written to determine whether a vendor can meet the future requirements. Requesting Milestone reporting and payment in the RFP as a means to ensure that the contract manager would be getting the information required and that payment was being issued based on performance requirements is good for the contract management. However, for an RFP, you might find it hard to ‘score’ a written response to Milestone reporting – ie in the RFP the vendor can provide ‘yes we will report on milestones’ or give an idea of what they’d do, but not anything really helpful.

Essentially, you need them to provide a proposal to do your project, and in general terms you would evaluate what is ‘important’ to know they can do the job – first would be the ‘how’ they’d do it (Approach/Methodology), the second would be ‘who’ would do it (Qualifications/Capacity/Experience), you might want additional information on their research/analysis tools at their disposal which could be included under Approach/Methodology or scored separately (depending upon how you want to see the information).