You want to CANCEL the RFP!?!

I had a client contact me after they felt a process they had conducted had 'failed': In the sponsor's mind, the RFP was flawed because they felt they received many unqualified responses, and thought the evaluation system did not result in being able to hire the best qualified partner. They had numerous vendors contacting them and wanted to speak to me on how to proceed:

My initial response was as follows:

1) If proponents are contacting you directly, you should be redirecting them to the contact person on the RFP (you can tell proponents that the optics would make it appear they are lobbying)

2) To cancel a process and then redo, we need to give a reason to the vendors that will not make it appear that 'the wrong vendor won' - vendors spend approximately 100 man hours on their proposals.  It's even worse if presentations were done because a 'failure in the process' should have been clear prior to the presentations.  By canceling and redoing, the short-listed proponents will have reason to believe the process is being 'fixed'.

3) To cancel the process & redo - it would be better to state scope has changed from original requirements - or qualifications/experience requirements have changed due to the outcome of a related project (but I'd question: why wasn't that considered in the first place???)

4) Risk - in the public sector, the process may be FOI'd and audited because of a cancellation/redo - from my review, the process did exactly what was asked for, so an auditor would seriously question why the process was cancelled.

5) Quality of responses - the quality of responses is a direct result of the quality of the RFP/criteria issued.  If the RFP was vague and/or unclear, responses will be vague & unclear. If technical specifications were weighted more heavily than solution based requirements, then it would make sense a technical firm would likely score higher.  If the solution is more important, don't weight the technical know-how higher!

What exactly failed in the process?  

The end-user (sponsor) had a picture in their head that no-one knew about.  As well, the end-user didn't know the full market to predict how different types of companies could respond to what was asked.  The procurement team could have avoided this by asking more directed questions of the sponsor instead of passively having the sponsor sign off on the RFP criteria.

Luckily, having worked with this client on a variety of other projects, we knew how to meet the needs WITHOUT cancelling the RFP - the 'technical firm' remained the winner, but the project went forward with supplemented solution/skills from the client department.