A Free RFP Toolkit from Gartner

Here’s an excellent, concise step-by-step guide to creating and evaluating requests for proposals, written by Gartner’s Richard T. Matlus and William Maurer. You can read it in HTML format here:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=476965

Here are the basic steps the two authors take you through:

1. Choosing the evaluation and selection team, including which departments of the organization you should have representation from.
2. Creating the RFP, including rundowns on each section.
3. Document evaluation criteria, including a weighting and scoring methodology.
4. Provider presentations. Here’s one suggestion I like:
   
   Ensure that the employees who will be delivering the service are the ones making the presentation. This will enable the evaluation and selection team to ask questions of the people that are responsible for the successful delivery of the solution.
   
5. Reference checking.
6. Final negotiations and contract development.

This is one of the best rundowns on the RFP process I’ve read. It’ll provide you with a working outline for developing your own IT-oriented RFP.