So one of the reasons I took my gig in the Military Industrial Complex was the assurance by the hiring manager that I would not be spending all my time responding to something called "RFPs." "RFP" stands for "Request For Proposal," and it's a legal mechanism whereby organizations ask vendors to propose solutions for a specific need, and the competitors do so by delivering reams and reams of paper copies of their response.
The reason that was important to me is that I hate RFPs. I hate them with the heat of a thousand burning suns. I want the entire concept to die in a fire, and take the knob who thought of it with them. They're wasteful, bureaucratic, inefficient, result in substandard designs and fail to serve their designed purpose.
However, due to a variety of reasons that are not open for public discussion*, a significant portion of my professional hours are now dedicated to RFP response. KMN.
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*I don't blame my hiring manager or my colleagues for this turn of events - it is what it is, and things change. But that doesn't change that "what it is," is sucky. And boring. That, too.
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3 comments:
Never had to deal with RFP writing, reading a few in my last corporate years yes; but that is another story.
RFCs on the other hand, my usual response was RFC 1149, I could tell very quickly if my PHB was reading what I sent him.
He wasn't.
RFPs are almost a way of life. Fortunately I don't have much to do with them, but it's always last minute and entirely uncreative (because it's last minute and few people understand what I mean when I ask, "what's the story you want to tell with this?"
For me it's, "What the problem you want to solve with this?"
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