The RFP Process

The requirements gathering stage of an RFP is one of the most crucial steps in the whole process. The objective of this stage is to clearly identify all necessary requirements, and all desired features, while filtering out those items which are extraneous to the true objective of the RFP. This is also the stage where buy in on the part of the future users, owners, and stakeholder's of the objective is most critical.

Determining the necessary requirements for the proposal sounds like a simple task - just go around and ask everyone what they want. Especially since we just showed everyone what was possible in the Scoping and Informing stage. However, people are going to be too busy, people will not see the value of contributing, or people will not know how to state what they need.

Often, people will try to state a requirement in terms of what they know, rather than using the percise words that are needed to create a clear requirements document. They will say "we need a Brand X". What they mean however isn't that they really need it to be Brand X, but rather that they need some of the functionality or features that are found in Brand X. It is up to the writer of the RFP to work with them to seperate the actual requirements from the statement.

Another common problem is that the wrong person will be providing the requirements, or that the right people are not asked. Often the person who is tasked with contributing to a requirements gathering effort is either one of the supervisors, or someone who is not needed or depended upon for daily contributions (after all they have the time). Generally, the supervisors will have valid input, but this is from a different persepctive than from those who are working hands on from day to day. The input needs to come from both. On the other hand, the person who is assigned to work on requirements to keep them out of the way, or the supervisor who is out of touch with what their team is doing can provide counterproductive requirements.