4 ms·

Recovery.gov Bid -- a Good Failure

36 points by cjoh 17y ago

antidaily 17y ago
"Management Approach: 15 pages" Yikes. My life has been a lot better since I stopped writing these type of proposals (and business is doing just fine). What a waste of time. The whole RFP process is broken.
- JimmyL 17y ago
  It may be - but for government work, that's the way it is. It should be simpler, but there's a whole lot of vested interest in making these things difficult and obscure to get into, which is something the Sunlight guys ran head-first into. So they tried, learned some, and maybe will be more prepared next time comes around. You won't change how the government runs contracts by posting on a blog. You probably won't do it either by submitting an inexperienced RFP. But of the two, repeated attempts at the latter probably have a better chance.
- Kadin 17y ago
  It's not "broken" ... it's that way for a reason. And that reason is so it can be steered to the people who are 'supposed' to get the work. What the Sunlight Labs people don't really understand is that they never had a chance in a million years of getting the contract. That's why the other contractors have been so friendly to them; they were never seriously in the running. If they had actually been competition, they would have gotten a much more hostile reception. That's not to say that what they did was a waste of time, but there's no such thing as a fair and open competition when government contracts are concerned. They're all rigged to a certain extent, and there's always more than meets the eye. If they (or any other company) are serious about winning work as a prime contractor, they need to build up a Rolodex of people who can make phone calls on their behalf. The best way to do this is to start off as a subcon, and work up from there.
  - akeefer 17y ago
    I would contend that the point of the RFP process is to make it harder to rig. That doesn't mean that the vendors themselves don't try to influence the RFP such that it makes them look better, or that the people issuing the RFP don't do that themselves. But it's overly cynical and a misunderstanding of where the RFP process came from to say it's there to rig the process: it's there because the bidding process has been "rigged" since time immemorial, and it's an attempt to make things more transparent and harder to rig. It's certainly not totally successful at that, but it's unfortunately often better than the other sorts of processes people use for major contracts (like no-bid contracts, handshake deals, etc.).
    - anamax 17y ago
      > I would contend that the point of the RFP process is to make it harder to rig. Whose point would that be? The point of an RFP is pretty much determined by its author. It can be to minimize said author's work (by cut/paste from previous RFPs), to ensure that the right people get the work, to give the author cover if the project blows up, etc.
- akeefer 17y ago
  Keep in mind that, especially for government agencies, part of the goal of the RFP process is to avoid any question of descrimination by making the decision criteria as "objective" and explicit as possible by making it possible to compare vendors along the same set of criteria. I agree that it's hellish (we fill out RFPs for claims and policy systems . . . thankfully we and not I), but it's not an easy problem to solve either. If you don't standardize responses somehow, such that every bid is ad hoc and difficult to compare to every other bid, it becomes very hard to defend yourself against accusations of partiality (and, naturally, much easier to actually discriminate). So yes . . . for both the government and private industry, the RFP serves as a CYA mechanism so you can say "we made the decision based on these factors right here" instead of "we made the decision because we just kind of liked this proposal better." But it's also an anti-favoritism, anti-discrimination mechanism, and it's hard to do that without some sort of standardization, which in turn pretty quickly leads to hellish, absurd RFPs.
sp332 17y ago
"As I said before, this RFP was written in a different language. That language isn't something we spoke fluently. We just took our first 101 class and have begun to learn the language and the nuance involved and we can start sharing it with you as we learn more." This alone will change the world.

36 points by cjoh 17y ago

"Management Approach: 15 pages" Yikes. My life has been a lot better since I stopped writing these type of proposals (and business is doing just fine). What a waste of time. The whole RFP process is broken.

JimmyL 17y ago
It may be - but for government work, that's the way it is. It should be simpler, but there's a whole lot of vested interest in making these things difficult and obscure to get into, which is something the Sunlight guys ran head-first into. So they tried, learned some, and maybe will be more prepared next time comes around. You won't change how the government runs contracts by posting on a blog. You probably won't do it either by submitting an inexperienced RFP. But of the two, repeated attempts at the latter probably have a better chance.
Kadin 17y ago
It's not "broken" ... it's that way for a reason. And that reason is so it can be steered to the people who are 'supposed' to get the work. What the Sunlight Labs people don't really understand is that they never had a chance in a million years of getting the contract. That's why the other contractors have been so friendly to them; they were never seriously in the running. If they had actually been competition, they would have gotten a much more hostile reception. That's not to say that what they did was a waste of time, but there's no such thing as a fair and open competition when government contracts are concerned. They're all rigged to a certain extent, and there's always more than meets the eye. If they (or any other company) are serious about winning work as a prime contractor, they need to build up a Rolodex of people who can make phone calls on their behalf. The best way to do this is to start off as a subcon, and work up from there.
- akeefer 17y ago
  I would contend that the point of the RFP process is to make it harder to rig. That doesn't mean that the vendors themselves don't try to influence the RFP such that it makes them look better, or that the people issuing the RFP don't do that themselves. But it's overly cynical and a misunderstanding of where the RFP process came from to say it's there to rig the process: it's there because the bidding process has been "rigged" since time immemorial, and it's an attempt to make things more transparent and harder to rig. It's certainly not totally successful at that, but it's unfortunately often better than the other sorts of processes people use for major contracts (like no-bid contracts, handshake deals, etc.).
  - anamax 17y ago
    > I would contend that the point of the RFP process is to make it harder to rig. Whose point would that be? The point of an RFP is pretty much determined by its author. It can be to minimize said author's work (by cut/paste from previous RFPs), to ensure that the right people get the work, to give the author cover if the project blows up, etc.
akeefer 17y ago
Keep in mind that, especially for government agencies, part of the goal of the RFP process is to avoid any question of descrimination by making the decision criteria as "objective" and explicit as possible by making it possible to compare vendors along the same set of criteria. I agree that it's hellish (we fill out RFPs for claims and policy systems . . . thankfully we and not I), but it's not an easy problem to solve either. If you don't standardize responses somehow, such that every bid is ad hoc and difficult to compare to every other bid, it becomes very hard to defend yourself against accusations of partiality (and, naturally, much easier to actually discriminate). So yes . . . for both the government and private industry, the RFP serves as a CYA mechanism so you can say "we made the decision based on these factors right here" instead of "we made the decision because we just kind of liked this proposal better." But it's also an anti-favoritism, anti-discrimination mechanism, and it's hard to do that without some sort of standardization, which in turn pretty quickly leads to hellish, absurd RFPs.

sp332 17y ago

"As I said before, this RFP was written in a different language. That language isn't something we spoke fluently. We just took our first 101 class and have begun to learn the language and the nuance involved and we can start sharing it with you as we learn more." This alone will change the world.