RFP, RFQ, RFA, & RFI

Formal Competitive Process Design and Evaluation

  • Designing and evaluating a formal competitive procurement process is complicated. It's not something you just do. You need to know what you are doing if you want to be successful.
  • I have 9 years of experience designing formal competitive procurement processes. These include major RFPs for subawards (subrecipient agreements), RFQs to identify qualified vendors and ranked qualified responses, RFPs to select the best value for a subcontract procurement, and many others. RFPs are often used for procuring services or software with services (software as a service). If you want to buy specific goods, typically you'd want a bids and not proposals.
  • Federal procurement guidelines mandate a formal competitive process for any procurement above the Simplified Acquisition Threshold.
  • Experience = Success with RFPs. If you've tried to do them on your own, you may have seen what happens when an evaluation team does not understand what it is that they are supposed to evaluate, or how they are supposed to evaluate. Knowing the right question is the key to finding the right answer.
  • A good competitive process gets you the best value for the money. It's defensible. It's objective. It meets federal requirements.

It may be that you simply need someone to take the reigns to avoid any appearance of impropriety. Just let me know. Nobody wants to end up in civil litigation for hiring their cousin instead of using a defensible process.

Wait... how did we get from grants to RFPs?

Knowledge is power.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” - Sun Tzu

When you write a grant, you are responding to a formal competitive process soliciting proposals to accomplish the stated goals in the funding opportunity announcement. If you understand all sides of the process, writing a grant or writing an RFP are simply two sides of the same coin.