Running a process you can defend

Set must-haves before responses arrive

Deciding what is essential after you have seen who can deliver it is how a process becomes indefensible. Mark your must-haves while building the RFP.

If you later overturn a must-have failure, record why. A documented decision to accept a gap is defensible; an undocumented one is not.

Treat every vendor identically

Same deadline, same information, same answers. Publish clarifications to everyone rather than replying privately — a vendor who learns something the others did not is grounds for a challenge.

Score on evidence, not impression

Demonstrations are persuasive and unreliable. A vendor who demos beautifully and answered thinly in writing is showing you their sales team, not their product.

Where a demo changes your view of an answer, note why. That note is what makes the score defensible later.

Keep the losing responses

Retain everything: responses, scores, rationale, and correspondence. Questions about an award tend to arrive a year later, when nobody remembers the reasoning and the only record is what you kept.