Fixed Price Rfp Template: Fill & Download for Free

I recently hired a couple of design agencies - one was straight up amazing, and the other was a total disaster.Based on those experiences, following are the things that need to be kept in mind when evaluating UX agencies:Past Portfolio (various dimensions)- volume of work done:how many projects have they executed in the past. Make sure to see whether they are live projects or just concepts. How many projects were executed in your industry?- variety of work done:Are they all the same kind of designs? Does the design vary with the type of industry? Have they worked with multi-lingual sites before? Are there are any sites similar to the project you have in hand?- quality of work doneAre they using design patterns? Is the navigation easy to follow? Are you able to locate the main call-to-actions and understand the purpose of the site after spending 30 seconds on the landing page? If they implement sites, check their HTML for SEO best practices and frameworks. How does the mobile view of the site look like?2. CommunicationIf it’s going to be a long project, you need to see how they communicate via email (if it’s clear and coherent). I usually interview the agency people and ask them questions about their design process, what they think about this site or that site, how would they approach my project etc.Apart from the content of their answers, I’m also trying to evaluate if they communicate well, they talk with reason (and don’t just throw needless jargon here and there) and have a systematic approach.I play devil’s advocate in this session as well. I ask them to cite their best project yet and share some criticism or probe them why they think a certain decision was “good”. The idea is to see how they take feedback which is a very important aspect. If they can’t consume feedback in a positive way and become overly defensive, that’s a red flag.3. Fixed Price vs Hourly Billing (we usually opt for the former)I ask vendors for a detailed quote where they break down each and every element of the project, estimate a time/cost for it.4. Working hoursIf they are 12 hours ahead/behind me, I need to be mentally prepared for that.5. Quality of proposalI read the response they write to the RFP I issue and see if they even spent the effort to understand my requirement and put some thoughts down or simply regurgitated what I had written.I’ve seen agencies simply copy paste the entire scope section of the RFP and simply add a price tag on it. I need to see some personalization where they reason why certain ideas or approaches might work well for my specific project. Moreover, the template they use for the proposal and the explanation of the design process gives me an idea of how much they care about presentation.6. Design ProcessIf their first line of action is to crank up some mockups, that’s a no-no.They need to have some kind of a research stage. I appreciate agencies who spend a great deal of time wanting to understand the goals of the project and personas/users that we’ll be designing for before they even touch a tool. This means they’ll be asking tons of questions in the start of the project and even asking for Analytics and any User Research studies conducted so far.7. Deliverables & Project ManagementWhat will they share with us exactly (PSDs, AI files, HTML/CSS etc.) and what they will use for collaboration (InvisionApp, RedPen etc.). How frequently will they give us updates and using what mode of communication?8. The TeamIs it just a one man show? I get nervous because I’m thinking he’s probably juggling my project with many others. What are the profiles and backgrounds of the people on the team? How much experience do they have? I’d like to at least have a sense of the lead designer and front-end developer and what their capabilities and executions are like.

The commercial team works closely with the bid management team to provide a response to the commercial section of an RFP.They do commercial evaluation and construct of all deals valued above certain x dollars/GBP/Rupee. In order to arrive at conclusion as to whether going ahead with any contract makes an economic sense for an organisation, the commercial team prepares internal profit and loss account to determine margin feasibility, prepare a cash flow statement by analyzing few ratios like NPV (Net Present Value), IRR (Internal Rate of Return) and payback period. The team reviews Master Service Agreement and Statement of Work with emphasis on commercial terms and conditions. Also, they do a 360 degrees financial health check up of all the prospective clients.After all the above analysis, the deal is qualified as go or no go. The company rating is being done and it is categorized as low/medium/high risk based on which subsequent investment decisions are made.The commercial team collates inputs from various teams like solutions, bid, sales etc and weaves the final output in form of a final profit and loss statement depicting relevant levels of profit, cash flow and determines the financial viability of the proposal.The commercial template is prepared to get inputs from various teams like IT, HR, facilities, operations, sales etc.Inputs from IT department - internet cost, any specific tool costs to be deployed in implementation, solution, if required, cost per seat etc.Inputs from HR department- training costs, manpower costs, recruitment costs, background checks, attrition cost, cost of rebadging, TUPE etc.Inputs from the operations department - ramp-up details, transaction details, billable hours per annum, business increase/decrease, agent productivity, training period, productivity gains.Inputs from sales department - SOW, timelines for RFP submission, current customer’s hours, details of redundancy packages - TUPE, COLA (Cost of Living adjustment), SLA (Service Level Agreement), cost of company, baseline volume, CTC data.Post getting inputs from all the above departments, commercial team prepares DSS (Deal Summary Sheet) to the relevant bid submission team.The deal summary sheet will consist of following:Pricing for services.Price inclusion and exclusion matrix.Proposal for financial engineering.Key commercial terms and condition.Pricing model for services could be any of the following below:FTE based - under this model, billing is calculated based on no of FTEs worked and corresponding time spent. An important step in this model is to arrive at skill-wise, location-wise and role-skill wise rate card.Non-FTE based - the customer tends to reduce their costs by novating agreements with third parties where a fix fee is charged and best efforts are made to optimise the cost for the customer with benefits fully passed on to the customer.Fixed price - herein, a set duration and cost of the project is agreed upon and the customer gets predictable results and benefits. There is no risk of wrong estimation of efforts involved unlike in pure T&M.Outcome/transaction based - pricing is done on the basis of output which can be measured as corresponding call, ticket, device etc.Gain sharing model - most riskiest form of pricing involving steps like determining baseline volume, forming logical groups which comprises of volatile and non-volatile groups and price per transaction. The company will suggest and bring about savings which can then be shared between the customer and company on an equitable basis.

I can tell you what I do. I read, revise, draft and negotiate contracts. I track my time against tasks, so I have a good idea of what activities take up most of my time.By far the majority of my time is spent carefully reading contract documents. When I say "carefully", I mean it. I read every word from the top of the front page to the bottom of the last page. My clients often provide me with supplemental materials (pricing information, RFP responses, similar contracts from the past, templates, meeting notes, etc.) I read all of that stuff just as carefully as the rest of it. My job is to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. This is especially important when the other side is nearly always deliberately obscuring the least favorable terms in the so-called "fine print", or in places that you wouldn't expect to find it.As I read these documents, I'm cataloging potential issues that I want to raise with my client. I'm also cataloging questions, comments, and issues that the other party(ies) to the contract need to address. I'm looking for risks based on what I see on the page, and based on what isn't there but should be.Initial document reviews are not the time to be pragmatic. Of course, deadlines are real – but my first pass through the document should take into account as many issues as possible under the circumstances. You never know what might seem unimportant, but later turns out to be critical. Contracts change a lot during negotiations. Something that didn't matter at the start might matter a lot in later revisions. I need to know about all the issues, and keep them in mind. My job is risk assessment, and helping clients define their acceptable risk profile, at the end of the day.Having said that, once I've spotted the issues, documented them, presented them to the client, discussed approaches to resolving them, documented the client's guidance on the issues, and prepared a responsive draft – that is the time to be pragmatic about what matters and what doesn't. If the client tells me they aren't worried about an issue, we don't argue with the other party about it.There's a lot more to it (esp. when you get into the back and forth of negotiations, and gathering consensus from client stakeholders), but I hope you get the idea of why it takes so long. The standards are very, very high. It's similar to being the guy who deploys critical code into production – mistakes are not tolerated. They happen because of time pressures, communication breakdowns, and the nature of things in general, but they shouldn't, ever.Now, a few words about efficiency, because I'm aware that some people will view my answer as "more of the same" from lawyers who stall and take too long in order to earn more. Most of my work is done under fixed fees. Why? Because it encourages efficiency without compromising the high standard of quality. We track our time carefully, but mostly only to analyze it internally so that we can accurately predict how long a particular task will take. Those of us who've embraced fixed fees have to do this in order to shake off the unpleasant implications of hourly billing.