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> I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would

by mcv 5y ago

> I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc. My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it. In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.

GabeIsko 5y ago
> That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a little bit in another paragraph, but governments can't just go out and buy things - their decisions will be held responsible politically so everything has do be done by the book. If someone goes off the rails, it potentially represents favoritism and people will protest. I see a lot of this happen in some of the more local politics I am involved in rather than the more routine world of software procurement, but people in my hometown are getting into quite an uproar over the local government trying to give tax incentives to develop an empty lot that costs millions in municipal taxes for yearly upkeep and appraisal. This presents an inherent conflict of interest, because the RFP process is insane. Therefore there is always a compromise that needs to be made for government workers to investigate and decide on project requirements in a fluid manner, and the need to document those requirements, set them in stone, and allow bidders to respond to them in an impartial way. The compromise is that there is usually an RFI stage where the procurement officers are "gathering information" but that is where they are really deciding what they are going to buy before they formalize the RFP. I think this is fundamentally broken - we need to recognize that procurement involves some deferment to experts who know what they are doing, and we need to trust them to make good decisions about how to do their jobs and get the software they need. But there is still a huge skills gap in a lot of governments over technology expertise, so the more a beaurocracy leans on responses to prescribe solutions, the slower this will be solved. > We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. Idk about your personal situation, but a lot of these times when you look at the RFP, there is a usually a clause to provide documentation, and training, and helpdesk support in perpetuity. Consulting and contract work is a field unto itself, and the big players are big precisely because they can organize large multiyear projects that will fulfill these requirements that cannot fail. I help run a partnership program at a software vendor, and we tell the smaller companies the same thing - don't market yourself to the government, market yourself to the consulting companies because that is who will be paying you at the end of the day.

by mcv 5y ago

GabeIsko 5y ago

> That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a little bit in another paragraph, but governments can't just go out and buy things - their decisions will be held responsible politically so everything has do be done by the book. If someone goes off the rails, it potentially represents favoritism and people will protest. I see a lot of this happen in some of the more local politics I am involved in rather than the more routine world of software procurement, but people in my hometown are getting into quite an uproar over the local government trying to give tax incentives to develop an empty lot that costs millions in municipal taxes for yearly upkeep and appraisal. This presents an inherent conflict of interest, because the RFP process is insane. Therefore there is always a compromise that needs to be made for government workers to investigate and decide on project requirements in a fluid manner, and the need to document those requirements, set them in stone, and allow bidders to respond to them in an impartial way. The compromise is that there is usually an RFI stage where the procurement officers are "gathering information" but that is where they are really deciding what they are going to buy before they formalize the RFP. I think this is fundamentally broken - we need to recognize that procurement involves some deferment to experts who know what they are doing, and we need to trust them to make good decisions about how to do their jobs and get the software they need. But there is still a huge skills gap in a lot of governments over technology expertise, so the more a beaurocracy leans on responses to prescribe solutions, the slower this will be solved. > We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. Idk about your personal situation, but a lot of these times when you look at the RFP, there is a usually a clause to provide documentation, and training, and helpdesk support in perpetuity. Consulting and contract work is a field unto itself, and the big players are big precisely because they can organize large multiyear projects that will fulfill these requirements that cannot fail. I help run a partnership program at a software vendor, and we tell the smaller companies the same thing - don't market yourself to the government, market yourself to the consulting companies because that is who will be paying you at the end of the day.