Patience my friends, Patience...

I understand the need for timelines within an RFP document, so vendors can schedule their team, resources, etc 'should' they be successful. However, no matter how I try to explain the time required to my internal resources, everyone always says "we need to do this ASAP, we'll make the time work"...and inevitably, the schedule is posted with incredibly short timelines for evaluating proposals, consensus meeting, recommendation and internal approvals before the contract is awarded.

Recently I've had multiple processes take longer than the 'stated RFP Timelines' and have had a number of vendor emails like this one: 'The purpose of this email is to respectfully request an update on the status of the "Evaluation" and to find out what the next steps will be" Unfortunately, I have no news to tell them, and the response always is "Once evaluations have concluded, all vendors will be notified in writing. The evaluation committee has not yet finalized scoring."

Unfortunately, vendors need to be patient. Evaluators need to read/score proposals in addition to their regular workload, then we need to schedule a consensus meeting to discuss/come to consensus on each proposal score, then have a recommendation written for executive approval, and wait for that approval before any notification can be sent to the highest scoring proposal. After the highest scoring proposal has been contacted, OR if legal advises to wait until the contract has been negotiated, then the unsuccessful are notified. This timeline can take weeks or even months, regardless of how optimistic the evaluation committee was that they could block their calendars to go through the evaluations within one week (I have yet to find an organization that has actually been able to do that!!!)

So, no, vendors, we are not ignoring you, nor are we forgetting to notify you, and your constant emails are not speeding up the notification process...we, in procurement, try to have our evaluators and approvers be realistic in their timelines, but my advice to you is be patient, and don't expect those award dates to be 'exact' - thus the reason the RFP wording states "estimated timelines" because we know our end users optimism will not translate into exact timelines...