The traditional approach for evaluating and selecting system products is the Request For Proposal, or RFP, process. The Reality Driven System Evaluation, or RDSE, approach is designed to be more pragmatic. Their objectives are the same – to select the best vendor/product choice given the buyer’s current needs and future plans. However, the RDSE process is a more streamlined and targeted process intended to more quickly “separate the wheat from the chaff.”
The Traditional RFP Process
In the traditional RFP process, the buyer creates a list of their requirements – both their functional and technical requirements of the system (e.g., features, functions, technical specs, etc.) and their requirements of the vendor (e.g., financial stability, install base, etc.). This usually becomes almost an exhaustive list containing both “needs” and “wants” – a hefty document, often containing hundreds of questions.
Using these requirements the buyer then does some cursory research to select vendors whose system products appear to be viable candidates. In some cases, when the buyer has difficulty articulating their requirements, or is predisposed towards a certain vendor/product, this preliminary research is done in advance, and vendors’ marketing information can actually become “informal input” to the requirements definition.
The RFP is then sent to these selected vendors, asking them to respond in writing by some given date. The vendor responses—usually as hefty as the original RFP and very often containing much “boilerplate” information—are then reviewed by the buyer. The buyer then attempts to evaluate the system’s form/fit/function based on the vendor’s narrative response to their RFP (usually some sort of weighted scoring method is employed).
Based on these RFP evaluations, a “short list” is created and these vendors are invited to make presentations and demonstrations to the buyer at the buyer’s location. Based on these vendor presentations, the buyer may then want to make visits to the headquarters of the more viable vendors to assess their corporate wherewithal.
At this point, the buyer may then be prepared to make a final vendor/product choice and enter into contract negotiations. Or, the more conservative buyer may make a preliminary vendor/product choice, but make their final choice contingent upon some sort of trial period where the buyer can “test drive” the product on their own.
The traditional RFP process is certainly a logical one. However, it suffers from two major weaknesses:
- Buyers are not as good as they should be in transforming their business needs and plans into crisp, clear, and pertinent requirements.
- Vendors have gotten very good at responding to RFPs in ways that are truthful and informative, but not necessarily revealing.
Reality Driven System Evaluation (RDSE)
A more realistic and effective method to overcome the problems with a traditional RFP is a scenario-based approach. In a scenario-based approach, system requirements are described as part of key business process flows. While not frequently used to evaluate system, the scenario approach is very similar to methods we use to buy just about anything else.
For example, when we buy a car we evaluate its merits against how we plan to use it (e.g., commuting to work, family vacations with the children, driving on snow-covered roads, etc.). And, we take the car for a road test to make sure it operates as we expect. We would not consider choosing a car by examining a detailed list of its basic systems and trying to anticipate how all these fit together as a motor vehicle. Yet the questions on many RFPs are as basic as asking if the car has four tires and brakes.
What prospective system buyers often fail to do is the equivalent of taking the whole family for a test drive to ensure everyone's expectations are met. The business scenarios are essentially the map for the road test for the system.
The RDSE process is about clarity, precision, and pertinence – that is, being clear about what is truly important in making this decision, and then focusing on it.
The RDSE process is a derivative of the Kepner-Tregoe® Decision Analysis process with a scenario-based approach to evaluating alternatives. This process consists of 4 stages:
- Clarify purpose.
- Evaluate alternatives
- Assess risks.
- Make the decision.
