websense

With all of the bantering back and forth Phil and I have had regarding web design/development RFP’s, I thought it might make sense to provide some ideas with regard to what you should expect in response to your RFP.

As you could tell in my initial post on Web Development RFPs, I’m not a huge fan for many reasons. One of the main reasons though, is that people are constantly asking for either outdated technology, or things that don’t exist. Phil, however, makes some great points about how to use them, and how to approach them the right way, in his post that can be found here.

So, with all of that said; if you do take Phil’s advice and put out a quality Web Development RFP, I ask you to do one thing when you receive responses. Be open to variation to what you asked for. Don’t look for an apples to apples comparison to your original document. Any Web Development Company that will serve your needs well, will take time to follow up with you and ask your permission to vary from/improve what you asked for.

We are dealing with this in one instance now. We received and RFP from a local organization. They have hired an outsourcing consulting firm to help them through the RFP/vendor selection process, which is all well and good. However, according to their RFP, they would like a site that both has a content management system and supports Microsoft Front Page. In addition, they specifically requested a Microsoft Access database. I won’t go into the reasons that these are all very bad ideas, I’ll do that in another post at a later time. My point is, that if we simply took that RFP, responded to it saying “sure, we can do that”, we would be doing a huge disservice to the client.

So, when you put out your RFP, be open minded. If you’re lucky, you’ll get some responses that involve personal follow up and some improvements on what you asked for. After all, aren’t you looking for someone to do a better job than you could do yourself?

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 18th, 2007 at 12:26 pm and is filed under General. 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.