Between a recent topic in the forums and a brief email discussion with another member (webiScoper? webiScopean?), I got thinking about the two biggest points behind lofting an RFP: focusing your team to create a concise message that properly represents your institution and the its direction (or desired direction), and the quality of response(s) received. Who are you, and then who gets you?

[This post briefly follows our experience as we searched for vendors to redesign our public website.]

First, compiling your RFP. It’s not an easy process. Even when our ‘core team’ included of the VP of communications – a communications employee for over 15 years – and a primary content writer, drafting the copy ranged from head-scratching to fist pounding. Add a pinch of IT and a couple shakes of senior management to the mix, and you really get to feeling like you need a firehose on hand. You almost need to write “clear and concise” by itself on a whiteboard in great big letters, to keep everybody on track. But since we looking for the Builders of Industry to tell us what they can/would do – we agreed to simply use this RFP to educate and explain. Educate our potential vendors as to exact who we are, as an organization; and explain what we think we need to do.

One helpful (albeit non-winning) vendor forwarded a pre-compiled RFP, which upon closer inspection appears to be an amalgam of other RFPs – it was over 25 pages long. It included in great, finite detail all sorts of technical desiderata ranging from content management, to SEO, to architecture & APIs, security, scalability, etc. Great questions, all; if arranged properly one could easily chart “who does what” and then calculate a (foreshadowing:) statistical RFP “winner” based on the weight afforded to each question and the extent to which the vendor satisfied each one. Great stuff – but if our RFP starts off at 20+ pages, how many pages of responses am I going to have to wade through? Dizzying. I still have the document if anyone’s interested; it definitely has a ton of merit – but in my opinion, it’s better suited to define exactly what your selected vendor is going to do for you, and how.

Finally, we felt our RFP described who we are, and covered what we perceived to be our needs; we introduced our mission and values, and used those statements as the supporting evidence – the driver – behind each Great Big Thing We Need To Do. Our mission and values statements are at the center of practically everything: they exist in our project charters, in our reward programs, you name it – they are the best yardstick to use when assessing the value of anything as it pertains to the organization. (And Chiefs love that!) We whittled our document down to about 6 pages; it described us, and what we needed to do. Out the door it went.

We started with an initial list of seven vendors (well, six and an incidental), of which we sent the RFP to three, and would pick the winner from there. The first cut was obvious – we elimiated the extremes, and the best way I can relate these extremes is with a food analogy. We eliminated the McDonalds’, as well as the haute couture bistro that’s only open from 5:15 to 7:00pm and only serves what the chef feels like cooking that day. We didn’t want to order from the same menu we could get anywhere, and we don’t really need a beautiful, boutique website that’s functionaly crippled even if it is stunningly beautiful. We want a vendor who could understand where we coming from, imagine themselves in our shoes, and then use their own comfortably familiar resources to build it right. We wanted our vendor to own what they built, not pwn us.

I won’t say who won or lost (hit me up off-list if you’re curious, I’ll spill), though I will explain how – as our team’s decision was unanimous, and for the same reasons: the winning vendor addressed our RFP implicitly. Their response indicated they actually read it. Their suggested solutions weren’t pre-packaged products, complete with consumer cheering sections and price tags; and they were only suggestions, they said, because ‘how could they know until they sat down with us and really listened’ to what we had to say. They seemed to latch right onto our mission and value statements, and adopted them as their own guidelines – because they knew if they used our measuring stick to judge their progress, then they shan’t be happy until we are. And in doing so, now they know why they have to build something one way.

I don’t mean to imply the other vendors didn’t read our RFP, but their responses were pretty canned & generalized. Lots of mass-published material. Some cross-referencing to our RFP, but the strikingly common theme was “I understand you want X, Y & Z; here are our products – check off those items which you feel are applicable to you, and we’ll put together a bill.” Say what? Ok, so it’s not McDonald’s, it’s … General Motors. “Here’s the base product, select your option packages, add a couple cool features – oh wait, can’t have package A and option D on the same unit! – and here’s your bill. Click to order.” They gave the impression that they didn’t understand or at least appreciate the soul of the organization which we managed to compress into a half dozen pieces of paper. They just wanted us to file ourselves into their nicely pre-arranged cubby holes.

So in summary, let’s forget all this RFP talk for a minute. You take that last sentence and apply to just about anything, and you can see why it doesn’t fit in healthcare. What is this industry really about? Patients. And while it’s easy to group any number of people into statistics, patients aren’t statistics. They don’t like to be fit into nicely pre-arranged cubbies. For an industry that requires convention, and a clinical sterility in its daily machinations, the absolute opposite in true in terms of addressing the people whom we serve.

Now take that philosophy and look at your Request For Proposal. Does your RFP say who you are? Now, which response understands you best?

• Field of Dreams – or, The Kevin Costner Effect
• In Times of Crisis

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Jake Bunger, RFP, communications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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