Requirements
A good RFP is short, states the problem rather than the implementation, is explicit about constraints, and says how proposals will be judged. Length is not a virtue: a hundred-page document is usually a sign that nobody has decided what matters.
One page: what is happening today, what it costs you, and what should be true when the work is done. No technology in this section at all.
Budget range, deadline and why it exists, systems that must keep working, regulatory obligations, who has to be able to maintain the result.
List the criteria with weightings, the format you want answers in, and the date you will decide. Ambiguity here produces proposals that cannot be compared.
Six sections, six to eight pages in total. Anything longer is usually padding, and padding hides the parts that matter.
Withholding the budget is the single most common mistake, and the reasoning behind it is understandable: people fear that naming a number means paying it.
In practice the opposite happens. Without a range, suppliers guess. Some guess low and win the work by omitting things you needed, then recover the difference through change requests. Some guess high and price themselves out of a project they would have been right for. Either way you lose information you needed.
A range does not weaken your position. It tells suppliers what scale of solution to propose, and it lets you see immediately who thinks your expectations are unrealistic — which is itself worth knowing before you start.
The instinct to specify precisely — this button here, this field there — feels like reducing risk. It usually increases it. You are specifying your guess at a solution, and suppliers will quote your guess rather than proposing something better.
Write what has to be true instead. 'A customer can reschedule without phoning us' leaves room for a supplier to tell you the cheapest reliable way to do that. 'A calendar widget on the account page' does not.
Boilerplate that applies to any project of any kind wastes the reader's attention and buries your actual requirements. Cut confidentiality preambles, company history, and long lists of generic non-functional requirements nobody will measure.
Also cut anything you are not prepared to enforce. Requirements that everyone knows are decorative teach suppliers that the rest of the document may be decorative too.
Six to eight pages for most projects. If it is longer, it usually means nobody has decided which requirements are real.
Yes, as a range. Without one suppliers guess, and wrong guesses cost you either scope or good candidates.
