Project Management - How to: Write a Great RFP/RFI Pt.2of2

Request for Proposal (RFP) or Request for Information (RFI)

This course is a result of 25 years of consulting project management experience, participating in dozens of vendor selection processes, gathering stakeholder requirements for a new product or service and analyzing multiple vendor responses.

We begin this section of the course with a quick review of what was discussed in part 1. Later we discuss different groups of Property Management System (PMS)requirements that have been identified by the stakeholders, including revenue, call center, marketing, IT, reporting and financial features to name a few.

Later we will learn how we assigned priorities to the requirements and added extra sections including additional questions, user journeys, pricing and references. We will also discuss a proposed response format for the bidders.

Next, we will present our Criteria for Evaluation of Responses including points assigned for each criterion for a total of 5,735 points total possible. We will then delve into the Detailed Vendor Comparison section of the course where all 11 remaining vendors are scored across all categories side by side.

At the next (most important!) stage of the project, we will talk about vendor demos based on 38 must-have features of the project where the bidders were required to demonstrate the ability of the system to perform the necessary operations and what came out of this exercise.

And finally, we will discuss how the final winner was selected and what factors affected that decision.