Avoid Saturating Your RFP or JITDE™ Brief with Trivial Requirements

Do not copy your needs to the RFP. Using your needs as documented as basis for vendor response is a:

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Huge mistake
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Waste of time
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Deterrent to making a good decision

Listing your needs and requesting vendors to respond with a "Yes" or "No" will likely result in:

All Yes Responses and Obfuscation

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It leads to a proliferation of questions.
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Vendors don't understand your needs, and you don't understand their products. When combined, they can lead to misunderstandings.
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You're left to evaluate non-differentiating vendor responses—all of them responding that they can meet 100% of your needs. So much for the RFP process and optimizing your vendor decision!

Ask the Right Questions

Leverage your defined needs to ask the right questions.

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Effective RFPs use a variety of question designs to elicit concise and informative responses from vendors.
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Good question design forces the vendor to think and formulate a tailored response to your question that addresses a broad swath of your defined needs.
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Designing good questions minimizes the total number of questions included in your RFP. That saves time -- both for you and participating vendors.

Minimize the number of RFP questions while maximizing the quality and thoroughness of vendor responses.

Question Design

Question design considers:

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The type or format of questions
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Contextual perspectives
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Simplicity
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Whether the question is published in the RFP or unpublished and used only by the core evaluation team.

Open-ended

These open-ended questions expose the vendor's level of understanding and actual capability.

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Limit the scope of these questions to a specific topic or sub-topic.
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Design these questions to elicit as much detail as necessary to confirm broad needs groupings.

Open-ended questions force the vendor to think and provide a narrative response that describes their capabilities honestly and coherently.

Yes or No

These types of questions provide straightforward vendor answers.

Design these questions to:

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Focus on a particular topic.
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Avoid any need for further explanation or qualification.

Specify minimum requirements using yes or no questions.

Contextual

Often, it's good to ask related questions from different contextual perspectives to verify the consistency of a vendor's responses.

Simple

Avoid compound and lengthy questions. Use plain English structured in concise sentences.

Keep a question focused on one topic or sub-topic.

Address any detail that the vendor or team missed during on-site vendor visits.

Published

These questions are published in the RFP to elicit a vendor response.

Unpublished

These questions aren't published in the RFP or JITDE™ Brief.

Your evaluation uses them to score a vendor's collective response to related questions and topics.

Design Your RFP or JITDE™ Brief Questions Wisely

Avoid Saturating Your RFP or JITDE™ Brief with Trivial Requirements

Ask the Right Questions

Minimize the number of RFP questions while maximizing the quality and thoroughness of vendor responses.

Question Design

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