OpenSourcery

I'm writing this series of blog posts to help improve the response rate on your Requests for Proposals (RFPs) as well as increasing the chance that the right firms will respond. We receive a number of invitations to respond to RFPs every week, and a surprising number do not contain enough information for us to respond.

Rule number one, always include a budget in your RFP. You may be thinking that disclosing your budget is a mistake, that it leaves you open to predatory firms, or price-gouging. I disagree, and I'll tell you why.

RFPs without a budget are perceived as risky to developers. We wonder -- does the requestor have money set aside for the project? Is the project even approved? Is it in too early a stage for the developer to get involved? Does the requestor understand the complexity required?

Perhaps more importantly, a developer needs to know that they're the right fit. Because of our size, it doesn't make sense for OpenSourcery to respond to an RFP if the requestor has a budget of $2,500, and it also doesn't make sense for use to respond to a budget of $5,000,000. It could be argued that as developers we should know how much a given project will cost. That may be so, but finding the answer is time consuming and therefore expensive. Providing that answer is valuable; it requires expertise. Don't expect that to be provided for free -- at least, not by people capable of giving an accurate answer.

Responding to an RFP has real costs. A developer must dedicate expensive resources; for example it costs my company at least five hundred dollars to respond to an RFP, both in hard and opportunity costs. It can cost us many thousands. I need to be convinced that there's enough profit potential in an RFP to justify the investment, and without a concrete budget I'm forced to guess. And my guess will always be "not enough."

Adding a budget is the most important component to an RFP. Don't leave it out.

If you don't know how much your project might cost, you need to find that out before you put your RFP out to developers. I'll cover techniques for doing that in my next post.