The Rapid Cycle Mini-RFP
Like many businesses, our organization has problems to solve. We have good people, products and processes but on occasion we decide that we need more than we have. Our Chief Strategy Officer sometimes reminds me that my vision for our achievements might not be aligned with our capacity. Perhaps this is the role of the CEO – to think a bit bigger than we are. But that’s another blog post. The point here is that we may need help sometimes.
When businesses develop strategies to solve problems, they generally adopt one of a handful of approaches:
Hire a person or people
Buy something
Build something
Try something (pilot / proof-of-concept or POC)
Partner with another organization
RFPs are generally reserved for big projects and evoke thoughts of 45 page .pdf documents with tens of questions and months-long processes of evaluation.
For the record, we never do POCs or pilots. We do projects, and all projects have phases of implementation. Phase 1 is always first, and while we can certainly kill a project at any stage, “phase 1” sends an implicit message that we’re optimistic that there will be a second phase and others thereafter. We’re not ambivalent about moving ahead with anything. “POC” and “pilot” send a message of ambivalence.
There’s an opportunity for organizations to use a process that’s smaller than a big RFP and bigger than a solution-focused decision. It’s the Mini-RFP...
Source: Docnotes - Category: Primary Care Authors: Jacob Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs
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