[HN Gopher] Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on
___________________________________________________________________
Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on
Author : asyncscrum
Score : 175 points
Date : 2022-04-06 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sofuckingagile.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sofuckingagile.com)
| Andy_G11 wrote:
| If the actual bid is not going to go your way no matter what, and
| if possible, just advertise subsidiary products which might be
| bolt-ons to other projects that the customer may want. That way,
| you give the sham process a veneer of respectability (which will
| no doubt be appreciated by both competitors and customer) and
| still get to raise the customer's awareness of some things that
| they might actually want to buy from you.
| Mulpze15 wrote:
| ROI of RFPs... It is so depressing for me to spend time on an RFP
| that I won't do it unless I am 100% convinced the RFP was written
| for me, because I know the account/people.
|
| It's not just the time spent on it, it's the feeling of
| powerlessness and wasting time you could be spending on something
| much more fulfilling.
|
| So much more fun to say "no, I won't bid" after a few emails,
| with little work behind it.
| antiterra wrote:
| I worked for a company that was incredibly high touch and kept
| getting burned by inadvertently giving free consulting on system
| design only for the customer to just hire a generic development
| contractor to implement it.
|
| They thought they got smart by adding a contract to the process
| that had a six digit contracting fee if the customer went with
| another vendor.
|
| The first big fish was more than happy to pay their consulting
| fee and then develop everything in house. To them, the fee (which
| didn't really cover the opportunity cost or development time) was
| a pittance.
| tetha wrote:
| Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B.
|
| Like, we've received the wrong questionaire once. It contained
| the question what we would do if armed forces intruded into our
| secured facilities to seize assets. We eventually settled on the
| answer "Run or hide, while calling the cops". At that point the
| customer noticed their error and it was pretty funny.
|
| In other areas, the consulting teams and us are developing some
| degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something
| the right way and we can give an annoying answer how nothing is
| possible due to security policies and compliance and further
| discussion requires meetings with people with long job titles.
| And suddenly, deal breakers aren't that important anymore. And
| sometimes you can even team up with the customers infosec
| department this way in order to simplify things into a both more
| secure and easier path.
|
| The best way we've found around this is to write white papers for
| commonly asked questions and topics, like storage security. It's
| great for our sales guys to be able to answer common questions
| with a PDF with a bit of glamour, but with enough
| incomprehensibility density to look important and to get
| forwarded to infosec / CISOs. Yes I'm a bit jaded about the
| process.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Writing the types of whitepapers you're describing is an art,
| and not a holy one.
| brightball wrote:
| When I didn't realize this was how the process worked, I once
| spent 2 weeks and about $5k meeting all of the requirements for
| the RFP including the amount of formally printed copies of the
| 200 page proposal had to be provided.
|
| Had delivered them.
|
| I was more than a little bothered afterwards because of the sheer
| amount of time and money put in. They didn't even bother to give
| us a courtesy call to let us know we weren't selected.
|
| In the end, they ended up hiring a company that was a friend of
| the head of marketing who delivered something completely
| different than what they'd asked for in the RFP. Frustrating all
| around especially because of the number of people that were
| involved in putting the whole thing together.
| brightball wrote:
| Apparently typing this on my phone was a bad idea. Apologies
| for the multiple typos.
|
| _facepalm_
| MauranKilom wrote:
| The article doesn't care to mention what RFP even means. So I'll
| be the guy in the comments asking: "WTF does RFP stand for?"
| toyg wrote:
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/request-for-proposal.as...
|
| _" A request for proposal (RFP) is a business document that
| announces a project, describes it, and solicits bids from
| qualified contractors to complete it."_
|
| Basically, it's a long laundry list of requirements for things
| you want to buy (e.g. software), with some vague justification
| attached. It's a thing in big companies and public
| institutions, which are supposed to have a high degree of
| oversight on any move they make. In practice, it's just another
| source of Bullshit Jobs, since the company publishing an RFP
| has likely already decided what they are going to buy and just
| have to go through the motions - a bit like those companies
| publishing job ads because they have to, when they already know
| who they are going to hire.
| bombcar wrote:
| Request for proposal. Basically a list of requirements for
| something, and then someone will reply to it with a quote.
| rav wrote:
| Apparently, "Request for proposal", which is a private-sector
| equivalent of a tender process (speaking from my point of view
| of doing a lot of consulting projects for the public sector). A
| tender process usually requires the agency to pick the
| quantitatively best bid (by some predetermined ranking scale,
| usually price or some price-quality combination), whereas an
| RFP has no such requirement and just lets the agency pick
| whatever seems subjectively/qualitatively the best choice.
| micheljansen wrote:
| Ha, most companies have no clue about how to even get started
| writing an RfP and are more than happy having a friendly vendor
| do it for them. It's not necessarily a bad thing but a little
| bias is almost impossible to avoid.
| zerkten wrote:
| You want to avoid RFPs except where you can exploit them. For
| example, if you are able to get by with smaller customers for a
| while, you can use the RFP process to gain access to stakeholders
| and test out ideas.
|
| Procurement departments are often keen to encourage more
| participation to help cover for the fact the decisions have been
| made, but as long as you aren't taken in, then it's less of a
| problem. In government and some industries, they may have
| opportunities for smaller orgs through other entry points, but
| the main RFP entry point can be easier to work out.
| edko wrote:
| Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a
| person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must
| publish it on their employment website, and go through the
| charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody's time. In
| the end, their preferred candidate wins.
| dtjb wrote:
| I don't think it's an exclusively bad practice, especially at
| larger organizations where cliques and silos are deeply
| entrenched. It can be hard to retain good people when every
| opportunity is spoken for by the director's buddy and there's
| no path to move up.
|
| I'm not arguing an absolute, there should be a way for leaders
| to hand pick the clear favorite when they're qualified, but I
| don't know if that should be the default policy.
| rmason wrote:
| This practice is fairly rampant at universities. It's just a
| way they game the rules they're forced to operate under.
| [deleted]
| Fomite wrote:
| Someone I know didn't get a job written for them because
| someone with staggeringly high qualifications applied. It's
| rare but it happens.
| perfecthjrjth wrote:
| This is needed for H1-B and PERM.
| h1srf wrote:
| Green card job postings do this because it is a requirement to
| advertise the opening. So you tailor the job description
| specifically for the person you already employ on a immigrant
| visa.
| nradov wrote:
| You're probably referring to job postings used to justify
| H-1B (and similar) visa applications. Such visas are only
| supposed to be approved if the employer shows that no US
| person can do the job.
|
| There's not really any green card job postings. But getting
| an H-1B can be the first step toward obtaining a green card
| (permanent residency) for some immigrants.
| h1srf wrote:
| Nope. Green card requires PERM which I think is a bit more
| extensive than the H1B process.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > tailor the job description
|
| And still don't hire anybody who shows up who actually has
| those qualifications.
| MegaButts wrote:
| > Some companies
|
| I'm genuinely asking - are there companies that _don 't_ do
| this? I guess excluding companies with something like <20
| people.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We have done it at every company I've ever worked for, but
| not for all positions. Probably less than half on average.
| But it is somewhat common to find that someone we know and
| like has become available and we open a position to offer it
| to them. But HR makes us post it anyway, pro forma.
| detaro wrote:
| I don't know if it's universal at large companies, but your
| cut-off is at least an order of magnitude to small.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Yes. In fact, it's probably safe to assume it's happening
| unless the position being advertised is entry-level or has
| multiple openings for the same job description.
| mulmen wrote:
| Of course there are. If all companies only publish job
| openings as a charade and know who they want to hire why go
| through the charade?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The H1 visa thing is one, although usually those jobs get
| posted in obscure places and are purposefully written very
| poorly.
|
| Another is if you want to justify using a contractor.
| Sometimes you have to show problems attracting good
| candidates before you can go that route.
| MegaButts wrote:
| You don't necessarily know who you want to hire when you
| have a position. The question is if you already know who
| you want to hire, do you always go through the charade?
| notahacker wrote:
| And the answer is "almost never, unless there are formal
| requirements for the appearance of a hiring process,
| which companies will tend not to put in place unless
| legal/contractual/csr obligations around hiring force
| them into doing or they really don't trust middle
| managers' ability to promote". Even a charade of a hiring
| process costs time and money (and much more so than an
| RFP process)
|
| Even organisations like universities that have formal
| requirements to advertise [certain positions] externally
| will stick to doing the minimum allowable (which might be
| a poorly written and overly demanding job spec put up on
| the org's own careers page for the shortest allowable
| time and any responses binned) if they've actually
| already made the decision.
|
| Of course there's also a tendency of people to confuse
| the charade with the more common case of a position being
| genuinely open and contested and an internal or existing
| relationship candidate applying (and sometimes but
| definitely not always being favoured), especially if they
| just missed out on a job after thinking their final
| interview went well...
| MegaButts wrote:
| In my experience it's the opposite. I personally know
| this has happened for probably over 100 positions, and
| that's not based on rumors but something I witnessed. And
| I saw that across a half dozen organizations ranging from
| 100-10,000 employees.
|
| So "almost never" is almost certainly wrong. My sample
| size is small, but it's big enough that when it happens
| 100% of the time it suggests it's the norm.
|
| Your assumption that organizations are efficient might be
| wrong. I'm basing my judgment on observation and you're
| basing it on theory.
| notahacker wrote:
| You personally know of over 100 cases where the company
| _didn 't_ have any sort of policy obliging it to
| advertise jobs, but went through a full fake hiring
| process with multiple candidates it was committed to not
| hiring just for the fun of it?!
|
| (Your assumption that my understanding of hiring
| processes is basely wholly on theory might be wrong)
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jreese wrote:
| Getting an H1B worker visa requires the hiring company to
| advertise the open position and assert that no other
| candidate met the required qualifications.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Either the company performs a real search with intent to
| hire, or they are violating the law in a way they think
| they won't be caught.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Every sufficiently large company will have some job
| postings which are charades, but that doesn't mean that
| every job posting from a sufficiently large company is a
| charade.
| icecap12 wrote:
| In my experience, this most frequently occurs if the company
| does business with the government (fed, state, or local). In
| such cases, the "charade" is required by Federal or State law.
| I agree its absolutely ridiculous, but large companies can and
| are in fact frequently audited on these and other hiring
| practice requirements (such as interview notes, etc.).
|
| At my $BIGCORP, if you want to give somebody a band promotion
| (meaning, up to the next major band), the job must be posted
| both internally and externally and you must interview any
| candidates who appear to meet the requirements. It's a pain in
| the ass, especially when you clearly have someone in mind.
| There are always people both internal and external looking at
| our jobs site because we're a well known Fortune 50; you're
| bound to get applicants to the higher level roles. It just
| creates extra work and wastes the time of all involved...but
| alas, regulation.
|
| eta: could also be a requirement of publicly traded companies,
| though I'm far less sure on this.
| umvi wrote:
| This has happened twice to my dad.
|
| The first time was in 1994 when he applied for an Air Force
| position in Italy. The role required a max 3 out of 3 score on
| the DoD Italian proficiency test and some other niche
| requirements, all of which my dad fulfilled. The Air Force
| selected my dad for the position since the only other candidate
| that applied was the person currently holding the position.
| Then there was a big debacle because the commander over that
| position actually wanted the extend the guy currently holding
| the position a few years and decided crafting a niche job spec
| that seemingly only he could fill was the best way. There was a
| bunch of back-pedaling and politics and the job position was
| redacted in order for the commander to keep his guy from being
| replaced by my dad.
|
| The second time was similar, but at a public university. A
| super niche job opening for their history department was
| published on their site that required experience with american
| military history, and a few other things my dad was uniquely
| qualified for. He applied, and the job posting was shortly
| taken down and my dad got a response like "actually we've
| decided to move a different direction from when we originally
| posted that job listing. That listing has been removed and we
| are no longer accepting applications for it". Seemed like
| another instance where the candidate to-be-hired was pre-
| determined, but my dad threw a wrench into their plans by
| applying to a job posting that was only supposed to have 1
| candidate (the predetermined hire).
| brightball wrote:
| I applied for a job that a friend of mine was up for simply
| because they couldn't complete the job search until they had
| enough candidates. I went through the interview process to
| speed things up for him. Got interviewed by 9 people when we
| all knew what the outcome was supposed to be.
|
| I spent most of the time talking about how great he was at his
| job just to move it along faster.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| So you're saying, there's gambling in Casablanca? Who knew? (your
| competitor did)
|
| I think there is a corollary to "If you don't know who the sucker
| is -- it's you":
|
| "If you didn't have the inside track crafting the RFP to your
| specs, you won't win the bid."
| notyourday wrote:
| We have an official answer of how we respond to RFPs - we send an
| invoice for "RFP response"
|
| * $5,000/h
|
| * 10h minimum
|
| It is cathartic to hear the freak out on the other side. We also
| say "No" to "Fill out this questionnaire" or "We need answers to
| the following questions". You either have a product they want at
| which point they will figure out how to ignore their rules to get
| you, or you do not have a product that they want and you are
| wasting your time doing "enterprise sales"
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| This happens a lot in government contracting...
| p_l wrote:
| F-35B happened essentially to ensure Lockheed-Martin won JSF
| bid, as far as I know.
| saynay wrote:
| I see a lot of Franken-RFPs in government contracting. You get
| sections that are just word-for-word recreations of a products
| spec sheet, straight off their website. But different sections
| are from different, competing, products. So the end RFP is
| something that no one actually has, and then they are required
| to award the project to whoever made the lowest bid. 5 years
| later, when that project inevitably fails, they do it all over
| again.
| n_o_u wrote:
| I've experienced this a number of times and it's mostly
| frustrating. Recently though, we've had two customers come back
| to us after their "preferred" vendor failed to execute. So even
| if they have a competitor in mind, it's sometimes good to get in
| front of them regardless.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Did you charge double the initial ask?
| 988747 wrote:
| Truth is, most of corporate directors have their favorite,
| battle-tested vendors, but are still required, by corporate
| policy, to go through some formal RFP process which they see as
| annoyance. That's why they go through unofficial channels: my
| company has been asked, on multiple occasions, to help write RFP
| which we later responded to (and won, of course).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| So how to you get into B2B if the deck is stacked this hard
| against smaller/newer companies? Hang out a shingle somewhere
| with a sticker price and refuse to do any RFPs? Schmooze a lot
| and hope to finally get on the other side of the RFP process?
| djrogers wrote:
| Having been through this several times, you usually start out
| with a differentiated product, represented by boutique
| resellers, and pitch/sell to early adopter types. After you've
| gotten a little bit of runway under you, you can start
| targeting a broader array of resellers and customers, and grow
| from there.
| sitkack wrote:
| This is where OSS can really literally and metaphorically get
| you in the door. But you will mostly also see occurrences of
| the big consulting shops using the same software. So it cuts
| both ways.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You look for procurement lobbyists and partners like system
| integrators and leverage those relationships.
|
| Also, you need to figure out if it's wise. Big companies or
| government agencies will murder you with insurance and
| compliance requirements before they give you a nickel.
| lukasfischer wrote:
| I had to smile while reading the post as I experienced this many
| times. It's a shame. The question remains: How can this be
| improved? Especially critically when public money is spent on
| large scale multi million projects. As a citizen, I would like to
| see a "fair" bidding process where the "best" supplier wins.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| Sitting on the other end, it can be super frustrating having to
| go with the lowest bidder, which you very well know aren't up
| to the task, but they managed to fill out the bid adequately at
| the lowest price.
|
| From here on it's a battle to get the spirit of the bid and not
| some useless interpretation of what you asked for.
|
| It's also a common tactic to seriously underbid and make up for
| it by overcharging for changes.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| Honestly, I don't think it can. Public perception cannot
| tolerate failure/issues - even if there are huge efficiency
| gains by not requiring _everything_ to be put through the
| process.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| RFPs are only one tool in public procurement. Usually you go
| the RFP route for a novel project that you don't want to
| manage.
|
| I have too many years of experience in the space. The
| successful projects are always owned by government managers
| and RFP or RFQs off of centralized contracts (ie GSA) for
| specific tasks or people.
|
| It is simple. If you can't manage the project, you probably
| can't spec it either. And if you can spec it, only time to
| market is a ideal reason to RFP.
| detaro wrote:
| Public RFPs are at least something you can sue over if your
| competitor gets too brazen benefits. More transparency into
| them for the general public would be nice, FOIA (or equivalent)
| requests help a bitbut then often come to late to intervene,
| just can bring it to light afterwards.
|
| > _As a citizen, I would like to see a "fair" bidding process
| where the "best" supplier wins._
|
| Defining what is "best" is of course the biggest challenge. In
| many jurisdictions, it can deviate from "cheapest wins", but
| then needs pre-defined criteria for evaluation, and any
| judgement factor of course can go both ways - it can be used to
| protect from a costly mistake and to give a benefit to a
| inferior proposal. But such criteria can at least be used to
| push it out from cheapest-wins, and make it easier to attack
| the decision to attempt to compensate for bias.
|
| A big problem IMHO are follow-up RFPs where the initial one
| didn't ensure their viability. E.g. once a company has won
| "implement system X", all RFPs that require "integrate with
| system X" or "maintain system X" are on one hand formally ok
| because doing so is actually needed, but unfair because if
| system X is sufficiently proprietary, the first company
| obviously has a massive advantage.
| jseliger wrote:
| I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some
| research-based businesses, and this happens all the time with
| public agencies: https://seliger.com/2009/12/27/why-seliger-
| associates-never-...
| ricksunny wrote:
| 100%. (Also involved on the proposing / applying side of grant
| writing here).
| mgkimsal wrote:
| I wrote the outline of what became an RFP for a university on
| site tech training program. Someone else won. At the time, we
| were about the only people doing this. Certainly the outline
| referenced things that we'd developed training material for, and
| we were early in this market. However another company 'won'
| because they were local, and didn't have to factor in travel
| costs (we had flights and multiple hotel rooms for a week
| factored in). The university was 'bound' to go with the lower
| bid, because they were claiming the 'same' material (which...
| they couldn't have at the time). Internal trainees reached out
| later and said it was pretty bad, to the point where they were
| telling the instructor how to do stuff during the class. But...
| they got the 'lowest' bid...
| random3 wrote:
| :) reminds me of my first company - I was still in college and we
| bid for selling computers and printers to the national railways
| company.
|
| I negotiated for weeks with IBM and HP.
|
| We made our proposal (sealed envelope type).
|
| We won.
|
| One week later HP faxed the railway company that they retracted
| our "warranty authorization" (or something like that).
|
| We got disqualified.
|
| Another blessed HP partner was supposed to win and HP solved the
| issue.
|
| I shut off the company and graduated CS.
| indymike wrote:
| I used to have a rule for my sales team:
|
| Never respond to an RFP you did not write.
|
| Most naive salespeople would complain about it and point out how
| ethics rules prevented vendors from writing RFPs. I'd then point
| out the similarities in the RFP to the competitors product
| descriptions on their websites and documentation.
| mindtricks wrote:
| I'm not sure I 100% agree with the rule, but sales teams should
| definitely consider it deeply.
|
| It's worth the money for a sales team that understands this
| process. If your team isn't influencing the RFP, that means
| they have no real relationship with the client and relevant
| stakeholders. You'll likely just pull in cost-conscious or
| high-maintenance clients.
| _jal wrote:
| When we were starting a consulting company back when, we fell for
| this once.
|
| As the article states, once you're aware that this happens, it
| usually isn't hard to spot the signs. After that, if we suspected
| we were being suckered for someone else's process checkbox, we'd
| offer to write a response at our normal hourly rate, and actually
| got a taker once.
|
| But in general, this stuff will bleed you dry when you're
| starting out, be careful.
| dagw wrote:
| Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean you'll always win it.
| I've been involved in cases where we had pretty much designed and
| sold in the project and basically wrote the RFP and then some
| other company came along offered to do it at a significantly
| lower price.
| Kalanos wrote:
| It typically requires a lot of time from your best ppl to respond
| to RFPs
| asyncscrum wrote:
| This is 100% true. The bigger the deal value, the less
| delegation there is. Often times, if it's like a top 10
| account, the CEO shows up and is heavily involved in the
| presentation layer.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > We need to integrate with Qlik!! We need a data warehouse! We
| need to restrict access to the app to certain IP ranges!
|
| But the time range and price quote never changes...
| hpcjoe wrote:
| Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP
| specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started
| building our own clusters. A well known large/prestigious
| university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP,
| and bid. We did.
|
| We found out later that they simply wanted help with the RFP.
| They never took our bid seriously. Small company with a great
| rep, they preferred dealing with the large companies with meh
| reps.
|
| Another one ... a university somewhere here in Michigan, an alma
| mater of mine in fact, did something akin to this, but used
| another vendor as its stalking horse. We constructed our bid
| aggressively, and submitted.
|
| Later that month, while on vacation with the family in Florida,
| the purchasing agent called me up. She wanted me to teach the
| other companies how to do what we did (much higher density, far
| better performance, etc.) I asked why. She said they liked our
| solution. They just didn't want to buy from us.
|
| We'd won the RFP. But lost the business.
|
| Of course, we declined teaching our competitors. They (the
| university) were unhappy with that, and didn't understand why we
| wouldn't do this for them.
|
| I was then, and still am somewhat, blown away by the complete
| lack of understanding of how businesses actually work, on the
| part of the RFP folks, the purchasing agents, etc.
|
| Another time, I had a university call us up asking for a bid for
| something. I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She
| said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before
| they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously.
| She said no.
|
| Yeah. I've shared some of these anecdotes with others in this
| industry, and we all nod our heads. All of us have run into this
| before. Some of the stories are far more outrageous than mine.
|
| An interesting tangent: I currently work for a company whose RFP
| we won ~14 years ago for storage, but was rejected by the person
| who was my first boss here, as we (the company back then) were
| too small. That's happened multiple times throughout my career.
| Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all
| technical and financial aspects, we "lost".
|
| Can be disheartening.
| bombcar wrote:
| The most understandable of all those is the "too small" - once
| you've been in the business long enough you realize that small
| companies can disappear quite quickly. Large ones can too, but
| it's much less common (and if they do go down, you can point to
| everyone else taken down with them).
|
| The workaround is to sell your stuff _through_ a larger company
| that 's complementary.
| toyg wrote:
| On the other hand, if you are a midsize or large business,
| with minimal effort you can effectively own a vendor that
| will act as an unofficial extra department. You give them
| enough business to become their biggest customer and they are
| effectively hooked for life, because who's ever going to drop
| a client providing 40-50% of their total revenue?
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> too small_
|
| I'm sorry to tell you, but I am one of those people who
| frequently argue against a small less established vendor, at
| least for anything really important.
|
| Why? I've been burned a few times. New (< 5 years) small
| companies can disappear overnight. If they don't simply
| disappear and have a bit of revenue then they often get
| acquired by one of the big players. Those players either:
|
| 1) don't know how to properly manage this new product and it
| stagnates, the 75% of account managers are fired and support
| goes to shit. Or:
|
| 2) the company has no intention of keeping the product, and
| despite initial assurances to the contrary a year goes by and I
| get a notice that they're shifting all customers of the
| acquired product to their own competing version. Sometimes this
| comes with a very sneaky hard sell to re-up on a long term
| contract before the announce the product EOL.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > University
|
| Universities are almost a separate reality. Unless you happen
| to be dealing with someone who has prior experience in the
| private sector, they will have no idea how businesses operate
| or how money is earned. It's typical to be dealing with someone
| who has been doing the same job for 20 years and never worked
| anywhere else.
| inopinatus wrote:
| This is common in healthcare, too. Both sectors then suffer
| from decision makers being senior academic/medical staff who
| think very highly of themselves but actually lack any
| managerial acumen, offering a sterling demonstration of the
| Peter Principle in action.
| bgroat wrote:
| My brother is an academic and has roughly zero understanding
| of real world operations.
|
| Which isn't too surprising.
|
| He's exclusively been in classrooms since he was 4 years old.
| drc500free wrote:
| With government contracting, your competitor didn't just write
| the RFP, they wrote the budget line item that congress approved.
| You needed to be there 4 years ago when appropriation started.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Flip-side, an honest & competent purchaser can use "cooked" RFP's
| to try to weed out incompetent, indifferently-honest, cost-
| overrun-prone, etc. would-be suppliers, when they're forced to
| follow a "publish RFP and take bids" rulebook.
| asyncscrum wrote:
| Yes this is also an additional gotcha that makes this process
| an even deeper quagmire.
| stormcode wrote:
| I worked at a digital agency for years. This is the most true
| thing I've read in ages. Every single point struck a nerve with
| me. I honestly wish I'd read and believed this before starting my
| job there. It would have saved me endless hours of stress and
| pushing back with my leadership about technical requirements that
| went nowhere.
| Shank wrote:
| > In the case of RFPs, think of it like you're buying a logo. You
| want this nice logo on your website, in case studies, in press
| releases and in CEO powerpoint decks. What is this logo worth to
| you?
|
| This is actually the opposite of true for big companies. Some
| companies let you use their logo, but most enterprise agreements
| will prohibit this explicitly. If you see a logo on a website,
| unless it's associated with a formal case study or testimonial,
| it's probably just an indicator that one person on the domain
| signed up at one point. If the logo later is removed and replaced
| with a different company, it's usually because they've signed a
| contract or been C&D'd and can't show it anymore.
| arrakis2021 wrote:
| Having read and filled out dozens of RFPs I can confirm almost
| all of them read like this. this is spot on.
| duxup wrote:
| > Must-have requirements that will never ever be used by anyone
|
| Heck sometimes the folks who created the requirement forget they
| were the one who created the requirement, and certainly forgot
| why...
|
| Or my favorite they requested it, forgot it was their request,
| and they make a big stink about why it is there.
|
| I got that one this week. Fortunately no real consequences aside
| from me shaking my head with my camera off / off camera.
|
| In my experience these situations are as much a company exploring
| "what do we even do here?" as much as looking at software or
| services.
| atldev wrote:
| So true. I once received an RFP template where our competitor had
| forgotten to clear their company (and even author) from the
| document details. I was glad because it helped us avoid a
| complete waste of time.
| jjkaczor wrote:
| So - over the past three years, I had an extremely part-time
| regional government client who I worked with maybe 40-60hrs per
| year through a friend's boutique consultancy, mostly as a
| favor.
|
| Last spring, I prepared a migration roadmap, including some
| initial estimates.
|
| Apparently, when they sent out their RFP, they included my name
| and the majority of my roadmap. My current client (a large,
| multi-national consultancy) was reviewing to bid - and someone
| recognized my name and reached out to me internally. We all had
| a laugh when I explained how tiny the actual project would be -
| heck, my friend didn't even respond to the RFP as it would be
| too much headache and not within his niche focus area.
|
| (Overall - this article is very accurate in my experience, I
| have been on both sides of the process, and typically it is a
| complete waste of time, resources and energy)
| ineedasername wrote:
| > _These may or may not be actually important requirements for
| this prospect to be successful_
|
| This is why most people who've been around even a little while
| grow to hate sales reps and the sales process in general,
| especially those large enough for an RFP.
|
| This clearly shows a demonstrable tendency towards the mercenary
| "close the deal no matter what" that is so pervasive. And it is
| usually very short sighted as well, because this is how you
| acquire customers that grow to hate you, bad mouth you whenever
| the opportunity arises, and switches to a competitor when
| possible, having learned enough about that product ecosystem to
| hopefully cut through the bullshit the next time around.
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