YES! It seems like some consulting companies are getting paid based on the number of requirements in their RFP. And companies doing it without consultants can access templates with thousands of requirements and think it better to include them than risk problems later. If requirements are gathered from a review of business processes, it’s easy to get bogged down in too much detail about basic requirements that any decent system will include these days. Another trap is to include requirements for each business process when a generic requirement (like attaching documents to any transaction or master file) will suffice.
Our approach is to focus on critical requirements which are not considered basic. We will ask the vendors only to respond to the critical requirements, but when they are the preferred vendor or it’s down to 2 vendors, they are asked to respond to all the requirements.
But with complex business requirements, we also create RFPs with too many requirements, and I am very tempted to simplify the RFP and yank out requirements that:
- Are not considered critical,
- Are considered basic, and
- Can be done with configuration changes such as user-defined fields
We would then save the rest of the requirements to be included in a design/discovery phase that is always a phase in every implementation. The design phase would be chargeable to our client, but the software license and remaining phases would not be chargeable unless the design phase was deemed successful.
In this way, the requirements are well understood by the vendors, and the client will see how the system will handle them. If the requirements is not met, the vendor may recommend acceptable work arounds or configuration changes.
Another possibility is that the business process should be changed to what might be considered standard (or even best) practices. If requirements for the business process are not linked to critical success factors (what an organization must do well in order to be successful), then we recommend adapting and avoiding costly customization.
