I was brought in to consult on an ongoing evaluation effort last week…they had a consultant already on the job – wanted to get my input before they sent their RFP out. They had done a pretty good job…my only criticism was the sheer number of questions they were asking the vendor. I was pretty certain the guy had just downloaded a questionnaire off the internet because it was chock full of boilerplate questions. Here’s the rule: If you don’t know what you are going to do with the answer, don’t ask the question.

Here are some requests I took out of the RFP.

What has been your organization’s track record in meeting your internal development deadlines? Do you really think you are going to get an honest answer here? And what relevance does it have to your decision?

How effective have you been in implementing your strategy and vision? Who cares? The answer to that question lies in market share and the amount of revenue on the income statement. The free market answers that question. Also, it really isn’t even answerable.

Describe the limitations of your current system. That’s the evaluation team’s job. Once again, you are not going to get an honest answer here.

Describe the most common customer support requests. This sounds good, but what do you do with this information? Is it really going to come into play during deliberations?

There were more…let me know if you want to know the rest.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 10:24 am and is filed under RFP's. 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.