In this post, we explore why RFPs can can set large, complex projects up for failure. We also uncover how RFPs undermine trust, transparency, and mutual respect in business relationships.

Requests for Proposal (RFPs)—and the documents that arise from them—often play a big role in project failure. Many organizations are still stuck in an outdated business mindset that often goes against the best interests of all involved parties:

In order to successfully execute a long and complicated project we need tons of approved documentation and a binding contract up front.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. By operating with a shared understanding of common goals and embracing uncertainty, you can find success in a world without the RFP—while also bringing your project in on time and under budget as well.

A Brighter RFP-Free Future

Organizations that distribute RFPs want to minimize risk. We get it. Large projects—especially website redesigns and digital product builds—are notorious for going over budget or taking longer than expected. Also, there are many crappy vendors out there who oversell their capabilities (and often underdeliver too). It makes sense that any organization wants to avoid this headache and find a good agency fit.

However, in the name of minimizing risk, these organizations also place unnecessarily rigorous and legally-binding constraints on projects that undermine the long-term viability of both the project and their relationship with a chosen vendor. In extreme cases, organizations lose huge amounts of money, vendors go out of business, and lengthy, expensive legal battles ensue.

The reality is that RFPs are often not a sustainable business strategy for either the organizations that produce them or the agencies that respond.

The Benefits of Ditching RFPs: Our Story

For many years, most of Mightybytes’ work came from RFPs. In 2016, we decided to add more rigor to the client vetting process. This included a stronger commitment to working on projects aligned with our values. It also meant significantly reducing the number of RFPs we respond to.

Since then, the company and its stakeholders have benefited from this decision in the following ways:

• Business Development: The amount of time saved by not answering blind RFPs allows us to focus on building better business relationships with mission-aligned clients.
• Billing: Combined with effective budget management practices, project stakeholders on both sides can better manage project finances.
• Contracts: Flexible contracting helps us build better long-term relationships with our clients (more on that below).
• Project Management: By focusing on target outcomes and prioritizing flexibility, we improve collaboration and incorporate new learning into every project.
• Product Quality: We launch better, more user-friendly products faster, which brings shared success.
• Customer Experience: Most importantly, clients are happy and our relationships with them strong.

Here are five things we learned on our journey to improve customer relationships and reduce the number of RFPs we respond to.

1. RFPs Waste Time

Time makes up your life, so wasting it is actually a slow form of suicide.

— Jeff Sutherland, author of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

It isn’t efficient to spend so much time documenting the entirety of a project up front, especially when most specs will change as each party learns more about what success looks like. When it comes to project execution, unpredictability is the name of the game.

The Agile Manifesto states:

Agility is all about trusting in one’s ability to respond to unpredictable events more than trusting in one’s ability to plan for them.

This is a big mindset shift for many.

Pamela Meyer, author of The Agility Shift: Creating Agile and Effective Leaders, Teams, and Organizations says that in reality preparing is much more effective than planning.

The purpose of preparing is to develop readiness for the unexpected, rather than solely to execute a plan…with a core focus on preparing, all participants [in the process] do more than adapt to change…[they] leverage its opportunities for innovation.

In other words, creating exhaustive project specs up front—especially before any contracts are awarded—is an inefficient use of resources. Often, these specs are wrong or based upon assumptions that haven’t yet been validated.

Defining Specs in a Vacuum

More importantly, RFPs not only waste time for the vendors who respond to them, but for the clients who create them as well. It is admirable to spend time fleshing out project requirements. However, clients don’t often have enough expertise to effectively create accurate specs. It is a far more effective use of time to do this together with your chosen vendor.

Some clients hire consultants to assist in the RFP process. However, collaboration and knowledge transfer are required to get any vendor up-to-speed. These clients are, in effect, paying twice for the same work. Which brings me to my next point…

2. RFPs Waste Money

The illusion is that RFPs improve efficiency, when in reality they create a cumbersome process that actually constrains all parties’ ability to make new discoveries and adapt along the way. Tied to a plan, organizations actually cut themselves off from the most important cost-saving strategy of all—continuous learning and innovation.

— Pamela Meyer

Here is Canadian RFP antihero Cal Harrison’s three minute take on why responding to RFPs is a huge waste of money:

It’s my best guess that in Canada each year we jam about $5 billion worth of wasted time and effort into our economy because of these inefficient RFP processes.

— Author and TedX speaker, Cal Harrison

If Canada alone wastes $5 billion each year in RFP responses, imagine how much time and money are wasted around the globe on the same thing. According to Deloitte Insights, the service sector, where most RFPs are born, accounts for up to 74% of GDP in high-income countries and up to 57% of GDP in low- and middle-income countries.

Considering that there are millions of service agencies across industries and around the world, it is easy to see how the amount of time and money wasted on RFP responses each year could be astronomical. Now that’s a broken system!

3. RFPs Undermine Mutual Trust

Let’s say your organization chooses a vendor based on their RFP response and manages to get through the time-consuming contract negotiation process. What next?

Now, both parties are contractually obligated to deliver on whatever is in that contract. However:

• What if you learn something new during the project that will drastically alter its outcome?
• Or maybe you hear from customers that they don’t actually want the feature you’ve already contracted a vendor to build.
• How do you prioritize new feature ideas under a fixed scope, fixed budget, fixed timeline scenario? Do you really want to hear ‘sorry, not in scope’ whenever a new idea arises? Because that’s what will happen.

If your Statement of Work (SOW) is tied to a contract, you often have little flexibility in these scenarios. Over time, frustration builds on both sides because each party isn’t getting what they need for success. Eventually, trust breaks down.

It is also unrealistic to expect that you can define a project’s entire scope through a few phone calls and some shared documents before turning in a proposal. This is a common—and very problematic—RFP scenario.

Similarly, there is no opportunity to collaborate or build trust in this arrangement. How will your team know if they’re going to enjoy working with this new vendor?

Prioritizing Collaboration to Build Trust

Conversely, starting projects off with mutual collaboration in an open environment allows everyone involved with the project to create consensus and set expectations. This engenders mutual trust, which ultimately reduces risk better than any well-worded contract can.

If our clients are willing to boldly go, arm-in-arm, into the unknown with an understanding that we’ll solve problems and address challenges together, we’re all in. Sign us up.

However, if they only seem interested in micromanaging specs and extensive up-front documentation, we’re going to respectfully decline the opportunity to work with them.

4. RFPs Put Unreasonable Financial Restrictions on Projects

We don’t know our budget. We want you to tell us what it should be.

— Common client response to budget questions

If you’re inexperienced and unsure what your project should cost, that’s understandable. However, the cat-and-mouse game of dancing around a project’s ‘real’ budget is counter-productive for everyone.

Many vendors—Mightybytes included—won’t pursue opportunities where budget parameters aren’t clearly defined. Be clear about your budget from the get-go. This sets the tone for honesty and transparency throughout the relationship. Everyone will appreciate this in the end.

Plus, if both parties agree to shared goals early on and use a target budget and timeline as their North Star, discussions about what to do if project parameters shift become much easier.

5. RFPs Favor Cheap, Ineffectual Solutions

Lowest cost is widely recognized as the poorest criterion for service selection when quality and professional creativity are sought…Nobody willingly chooses a surgeon based upon a doctor’s willingness to perform an operation most cheaply.

— Wikipedia entry for Qualifications-Based Selection (see below)

Finally, many RFPs—especially those from government agencies and sometimes nonprofits—state outright that the lowest bidder will win the contract. This is problematic for many reasons:

• Inexperienced vendors will often make claims they cannot deliver on just to win the work while inexperienced clients may not know the difference.
• Seasoned vendors—who might have exactly the experience you need to successfully execute your project—may get priced out of consideration, or worse, won’t submit a bid at all.
• Considering the vast number of unknowns that typically exist before a project even starts, lowest price consideration is risky unless the chosen vendor has a proven track record of delivering similar projects under similar constraints. Even then, for all the other reasons mentioned in this post, choosing vendors based on lowest cost isn’t smart.

We have seen firsthand where clients chose a lower cost vendor and then ultimately paid us to rework all or some of their project. Ultimately, this cost them more than choosing us in the first place.

As we mentioned above, the process of knowledge transfer is ongoing. Embrace uncertainty as part of your project from the start and share your budget up front. An experienced vendor will know how to work with these parameters.

Defining success based solely on lowest price sets up a race to the bottom for your project and the industry overall. Who wants that?

What’s a More Sustainable Solution to RFPs?

How then do we address all these issues that RFPs present? Here are a few ideas.

Qualifications-Based Selection

QBS has proven that buyers get better outcomes and greater value by excluding price as an evaluation criteria when hiring a professional services firm…

— QBS Canada

In qualifications-based selection (QBS), which was established by the U.S. Congress as part of the Brooks Act in 1972, cost is not a factor when assessing vendor hiring decisions. Rather, vendors are chosen based on their qualifications and ability to prove they have tackled similar challenges.

This does not mean that service fee negotiation is removed from the process. It just means that negotiation happens after the vendor is selected and before final contracts are drawn up.

However, qualifications-based selection is not without challenges:

• It can be difficult for new or inexperienced businesses to get a much needed foothold into the selection process.
• Some organizations fold an RFP into this process, which negates the advantage of taking this approach in the first place.

While not a perfect answer, basing the selection criteria on qualifications and ability to execute versus budget and timeline can yield better results.

Product Roadmapping

Your product roadmap is the prototype for your strategy.

— Product Roadmaps Relaunched, O’Reilly Media

Up front product roadmapping engagements provide project stakeholders with a low-risk way to define key parameters and build consensus in a collaborative setting. At Mightybytes, we bill these engagements separately from project fees and don’t require contracts to run them. This reduces risk and sets the tone for a mutually beneficial relationship.

Does this mean we’re just replacing extensive up-front documentation with a different name? Absolutely not. Successful product roadmaps rely on three things:

1. The process is grounded in collaboration and co-creation, which produces results faster.
2. Product Roadmaps are lean, providing just enough information to set clear goals and manage expectations.
3. Project stakeholders revisit the roadmap over time, making adjustments as new learning occurs.

Whether you incorporate a full roadmapping engagement or not, in our experience, up front, paid discovery processes will make the difference between your project’s success or failure.

Master Services Agreements

Our most successful and long-term customer relationships—some of which span multiple decades now—are guided by Master Services Agreements (MSAs) rather than project-specific contracts. Sure, we still do SOWs for individual deliverables, but this approach is lower risk for all involved.

Under these arrangements, the MSA guides terms of the client-vendor relationship, such as:

• Who owns deliverables
• How payments are handled
• The best way to communicate and document changes
• And so on …

Large, complex projects are broken down into more manageable chunks under individual SOWs, each of which covers a component of the overall project. This allows for more flexibility while still maintaining legally binding terms between the organizations.

Approaching Your Next Big Project

Here are some things for both service agencies and organizations considering RFPs to think about when jumpstarting your next big project.

Advice to Vendors

Agencies and other service providers, consider these points before responding to your next RFP:

• Budget & Timing: Ask about budget and timing parameters during the first call. This will save everyone a lot of time. Consider politely declining the opportunity if you can’t get clear answers.
• Discussing Uncertainty: Be clear about how you address project uncertainties and that your estimates are just…estimates.
• Managing Expectations: If you win the project, schedule regular, ongoing conversations about budget, timing, and deliverables.
• Business Development: Consider supplementing RFP responses with other business development avenues. Diversifying income sources is key to a service agency’s long-term success.

Advice to Clients

Thinking about going down the RFP path? Consider the following:

• QBS: Consider hiring vendors based on experience and qualifications instead of asking for extensive project and cost details up front.
• Budgeting: Be upfront about project financial parameters. If both parties clearly understand shared goals—and the budget available to meet those goals—you can figure out how best to address project challenges together. Remember, a feature is an output, not an outcome.
• Contracts: Consider the MSA approach mentioned above rather than restrictive contracts that leave little flexibility for new learning or changing parameters.
• Planning vs. Preparing: Don’t over-plan. Things will always change. Knowing that going into your project will result in more successful outcomes.

In Closing

The RFP process goes back decades. Many industries have been slow to move away from using them, despite their significant inefficiencies.

For many years, RFPs were a crutch that Mightybytes relied on to shield us from the hard work of finding good clients and developing mutually beneficial, long-term relationships.

However, the amount of redirected energy we diverted from answering RFPs to other areas of the business enabled us to build a stronger, more resilient company. This benefits all our stakeholders.

Given this, might you see similar advantages to reconsidering RFPs at your organization?