Writing Good RFP Questions

The purpose of asking questions in an RFP is to elicit information from suppliers that allows an objective assessment and comparison of bids. To achieve this, questions must be framed in such a way as to minimise ambiguity. In general, this means asking more “closed” questions - that is questions with a limited range of possible answers, such as multiple choice or numerical questions. However, in practice, this can be difficult. In this article we explore how to frame a good RFP question.

Objective Bid Comparison

An RFP doesn’t have to involve questionnaires and surveys. At its most simple, a Request For Proposal,
can be just that, a letter, email or phone call to potential suppliers saying “We want to buy a new product/service, please send me your proposal”.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that the proposals returned will look very different from
one another, and will contain very different information. This makes an accurate assessment and comparison difficult and time consuming, and it will frequently be necessary to request further information from some or all of the bidders.

For this reason, a well structured RFP will request specific information from bidders, and will demand that
this information is presented in a consistent format that encourages side by side comparison. Questions will be well thought out so that they elicit information which is pertinent to the evaluation, and which lends itself to objective ranking.

RFP Structure & Criteria Granularity

Generally, the greater the degree to which information requested by an RFP is broken down into sections and individual questions, the better. Each section and question can be given a weighting to determine how much it contributes to the total score for a supplier. However, if questions become too fine grained then it can be impossible to assign a meaningful weight.

For example, suppose we start with a broad question about an IT vendors support:

This question will invite a very general answer, covering product documentation, website support,
phone support, 24/7 coverage and so on. A buyer might view some of these things as important,
others as not. But with only one question there is no way to reflect these priorities. A better structure is:

Inspired by this improvement, we might decide we want yet more control and elaborate further
on question 3.4:

We’ve achieved a greater level of detail, but by breaking down the criteria it becomes much more difficult to assign useful weights or scores. Do we really care whether forum comments are moderated? If so, do we care more about that or anonymous comments? In reality, we probably don’t care much either way, and neither should we.

So good rfp questions should be fine grained enough to allow us to fully express our priorities, but not so detailed that we get lost in irrelevant detail. In cases where we wish to assign a single weighting to a question, but where we need to be sure to capture specific information within the question we need to design questions with sub-elements. This is a screenshot of such a question designed in SupplierSelect:

This question collects very detailed information, but is treated as one unit for scoring and weighting purposes. One of the more flexible characteristics of SupplierSelect is the ability to create questionnaires with any combination of sections and subsections to any depth, with questions containing any number and type of input elements.

Closed vs. Open Questions

Open Questions allow bidders to give a free form answer to a question. in some cases this may be difficult to avoid:

“Please describe your company’s history”

Answers to open questions can be difficult to compare, and beg the question of what objective assessment criteria can be contained in such a question. To take the above example, what might it be about a company’s history that will affect their suitability as a supplier? One obvious factor is age. A young company might be viewed as being less stable or reliable. So we might replace the open question above with a new question:

“Please indicate the age of your company in years”

Now we’ve got some tangible data for side by side comparison. If we assume older is better, then we could score comparitively, so that the oldest bidder gets the best score for this question. However, on reflection we might find that this gives rather unhelpful results.

Does Vendor C really deserve a higher score than Vendor B? Not really. So we need to think about our requirements. Let’s say that we’re very worried by companies less than 3 years, concerned about companies less than 7 years old, and totally relaxed about the rest. So we can improve our question again:

Please indicate your company’s age:  

3 years or less 3-7 years More than 7 years

Now we can assign a score to each option and have a fairly rational basis for comparison.

Questions can be too closed

Once again, we reflect on our question about company age. Are there circumstances under which this rigorous, closed questionning might be unreasonable? For example what happens if the company was formed as a subsidiary of a larger, older company, is staffed by a long established team from the parent company, and is well funded by the parent? We cannot foresee all the possible circumstances that might affect our assesment of this point. So we decide to allow the bidder to qualify their answer with a comments box:

Please indicate your companies age:  

3 years or less 3-7 years More than 7 years

Comments:

 

With this question we can now apply auto scores to each multiple choice question so that scores are added automatically when the bidder submits their response. But the comment field allows us to moderate these scores in the case of special circumstance.

Well Understood Requirements; Well Framed RFP Questions

Thinking through what the sourcing exercise seeks to achieve, and breaking this down into detailed service or product requirements is the critical aspect of an RFP vendor evaluation. When the requirements have been clearly enunciated the process of drafting good rfp questions is simple. Good questions are those that elicit the information required in a way that encourages accurate evaluation and comparison of vendors.

Typically, drafting an RFP is an iterative process. As the RFP author endeavours to frame questions it soons becomes apprent which aspects of the project definition and requirements vague or poorly defined. Struggling to write good questions should not be thought of as a tiresome chore but as an exercise in better understanding what problem is being addressed, and what service or product characteristics are required to solve it.

Web Based RFP Software & Collaborative RFP Design

Using a web based RFP software system can help the buyer to create good RFP questions because the questions are accessible, and editable, online. Thus a team of RFP participants can collaborate on the same questionnaire, reviewing, editing and approving questions. Furthermore, many of the same questions tend to crop up across different RFP projects. Fully featured RFP management software enables the user to build a library of reusable questionnaire elements (sections and individual questions) that promote reuse between projects.

 

Further Reading

Effective RFP Development, by Bud Porter-Roth

© SupplierSelect Ltd 2008

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 2:57 am and is filed under Resources. 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.