At the last CoTech Gathering a few of us were sharing our frustrating experience of clients who seem to have unreasonable expectations and processes around commissioning a project.
I wrote a blog about it. We plan to share this with clients when they take the piss. And of course we genuinely hope that this feedback might be useful for them or anyone thinking of embarking on a new tech project.
If anyone else has content like this or relevant ideas about how to reduce the overhead of not winning work then please share!
These first steps with a client are always tricky; it’s very interesting to hear about other people’s struggles. It would be great to share views on approaching clients, setting prices for your work, managing expectations, etc., both from the perspective of those who offer services and those who hire service providers.
This is great. If at all possible I would add an example of what a good request for proposal looks like. A template of ethical behavior can go a long way.
Thanks for writing this Polly—it’s really valuable, and I can imagine we’ll either share this with some potential clients in the future or write a similar thing from our perspective (as we’re doing a lot of research, learning and evaluation work right now, the needs are similar but a little different).
I think it’s really important that we’re all helping build literacy about how to do this process better! A lot of people we’ve worked with didn’t particularly have a reason for following the procurement process they did—they just did what someone else has done in the past because they thought it was the only option.
Sometime last year, we worked on a project for a client that we called “ghost bidding”—which was essentially taking their RFQ/ITT/similar and putting together a draft bid for it (and committing not to contribute an actual bid to it) because they had experienced getting a bunch of low quality responses in the past. We helped them to see that their process was locking people (especially small orgs) out of responding, and helped them to redesign their tender process. We actually were then able to benefit from that with a different project from the same organisation later that year.
We’re seeing a lot of overly-competitive poorly defined briefs that are asking for everything but the kitchen sink at the moment, so we’re wondering whether we need to spin up a formal service around ghost bidding.