By Deb Mielke
Network World, 5/18/98

Are those late nights troubleshooting net connections to Singapore getting you down? What about all those calls from angry corporate salespeople who can't access pricing data from the road? Right now, those network outsourcing vendors that have been beating down your door might be sounding pretty reasonable. After all, you've been trying to hire three new net engineers for months, and the only applicants have been unemployed music majors. Maybe it's time to start thinking about outsourcing your network.

But there's a catch: You dread the laborious task of drafting a request for proposal. This document spells out your requirements for service and equipment and gives prospective vendors the information they need to prepare a bid. Although you may be tempted to just bang out your requirements in a hurry and slap the paperwork together, the time you in-vest in preparing a solid RFP will later save time, money and frustration.

After all, the RFP is the template for your vendor's contract with you. If the vendor doesn't know what you expect, a long contract negotiation is a certainty. In fact, a less-than-solid RFP could ultimately result in both parties throwing their hands in the air and deciding it's just not the worth the effort to do business together.

With that in mind, this guide will walk you through the steps of the RFP process. The advice is based on consulting firm TeleChoice, Inc.'s recent experience outsourcing its network.

Writing an RFP: Step 1
Take it from the top.

Describe your enterprise network and determine your business requirements. Focus on these key areas and answer the following questions:

• Applications and business processes the network supports. Are some services more mission-critical than others? Is your business global, national or regional? Are there critical periods when the network must be particularly stable?

• Current network service levels. What are the current goals and performance in such areas as availability, mean time to restore, utilization and latency? How are these metrics gathered and reported? Are there areas in which improvements could be realized through investment in automation?
  
  
• Network topology. Are there any long overdue network design changes? Which protocols are supported? Do you plan to add, remove or change locations, protocol support or speed? Have you experienced any major problems with the topology?

• Technology. What hardware and software are running on the network? Has any equipment or software been modified to support nonstandard protocols or systems? Do you plan to migrate from routers to switches, 14.4K bit/sec modems to V.90, or ISDN to digital subscriber line?

• Help desk. Does a single group handle application and network problem calls? What are the help desk's problem resolution responsibilities?

• Current budget. How much are you spending on people, hardware, software, tel-communications, network management, etc.? Take time to understand the components that will not be reduced or changed by outsourcing, such as your salary.

• Contractual obligations. Do any contracts have exclusivity clauses? What are the term commitments? This could be important if you end up choosing a carrier or ISP instead of your current service provider.

Find out what functions your prospective outsourcers can handle by visiting their Web sites. Next, meet with the vendors that appear to be able to meet your needs. If your requirements fall outside the outsourcer's definitions, outsourcing the network or specific components of the network may prove difficult, costly or just plain unfeasible.

Pare the list of potential vendors to a manageable number. How many vendors can you logically work with during the RFP process? Ideally, you should aim to work with three to five vendors.

Writing an RFP: Step 2
Drafting the RFP.

The most important thing to remember when you draft an RFP is "garbage out, garbage back." In other words, if your RFP is comprehensive and honest, the proposals you receive are likely to be comprehensive and honest, too. But outsourcing fails miserably when the customer and vendor are discovering information about each other during the term of the contract. Share as much information as you can with prospective vendors.

The following RFP outline is geared toward a virtual private network (VPN). Your RFP should include all of the following sections to ensure comprehensive and clear responses:

Section 1 - General information

• Executive summary. Describe your business, market position and revenue. Outline the business and technical reasons you're considering outsourcing.

• Scope. Outline the organization of the RFP document.

• Schedule of events. Provide a time line for the vendors, including the date of the RFP release, proposal deadline, vendor presentations, contract award and letter of intent. Also list your evaluation procedures and criteria.

• Introduction. Clearly define the expected proposal format, to whom and how the proposal should be delivered (including number of copies) and how questions regarding the RFP will be handled (will you publish all vendors' questions and your answers to all parties involved?)

• Letter of transmittal. Define the content of each responding vendor's cover letter. Require an officer of the company to sign the letter so you know the vendor's bid has management approval and backing.

• Content. Define the section layout of all vendor proposals. Ensuring consistent proposal format and content will save you time evaluating and comparing proposals.

As you get to the meat of the RFP, make sure to ask detailed questions to gain a comprehensive understanding of each vendor's service offering.

• General considerations. Provide an overview of your current environment. For example, you might include the number of telecommuters, geographic dispersion, applications, equipment, software, security, network infrastructure, network management, help desk and network service levels.

• Equipment specifications. Outline the specifications for the equipment you want the outsourcer to supply or manage. Do you have a particular vendor standard? VPN requirements might include ISDN terminal adapters, DSL equipment, small office/home office router, remote access concentrator, router and firewall.

• Software specifications. List the specifications for the software you want the outsourcer to supply or manage. This could include a Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service system, security client, router software and firewall software.

• Installation and project management. Outline your expectations for installation and project management. How long will the project last? Are the vendor's personnel qualified? Does the vendor have personnel in the geographic regions you require? What is the implementation time frame for new users?

• Configuration management. Outline your expectations for configuration management. How often are changes implemented? What are the vendor's "back-out" procedures should a configuration change go wrong? Are configurations stored in more than one location?

• Performance management. Outline your performance management requirements and reporting needs. What does your management expect from you? Make sure your requests are reasonable yet meet the needs of your business users. A VPN would include availability, latency, mean time to restore, utilization and Web-based management reports by region.

• Fault management. Define the faults for which you expect the vendor to assume responsibility. Defining boundaries of responsibility is critical, otherwise you and your vendor will be finger-pointing for the life of the contract. A vendor's response to this section will tell you how it manages networks, the vendor's network management infrastructure and the number and experience of network management personnel.

• Security management. Along with protecting your business from intrusion, security management is key to understanding how the vendor manages the security of your network. For a VPN, make sure you understand the exact level of security provided by encryption, key management, authentication, token cards and the vendor.

• Asset management. Because outsourcing implies giving up control of your network, make sure vendors have a plan for managing and tracking your assets. Poor asset management can lead to extended outages.

• Help desk. Network outsourcing and help desk support is tricky. Most vendors will only supply Level two and Level Three network support, which means your help desk needs to take the initial call, diagnose the problem and notify the vendor if the problem originated in the network. But it could be nearly impossible to diagnose whether a remote user is having a network problem vs. an application problem, so you may want to consider outsourcing first-level help desk services too.

• Maintenance. Find out who will actually provide hardware maintenance. Vendors of-ten use a subcontractor for these services, so be sure you understand the service-level agreements (SLA) between the vendor and its subcontractor.

• Provide your company's standard contract terms and conditions and reiterate the service levels you expect the vendor to meet.

• Include any information the vendor will require to complete its proposal, such as location addresses and telephone numbers, traffic volumes and depreciation schedules.

While you're waiting for vendors to submit their proposals, spend time constructing your evaluation assessment form. (you should have already stated the criteria in the RFP).

In TeleChoice's case, the criteria were cost, reliability, management capabilities and account support.

The easiest and most comprehensive method is to construct two spreadsheets to perform side-by-side comparisons. Use one for quantitative assessments and the other for qualitative assessment.

Again, make sure your prospective vendors understand the evaluation criteria. The quantitative assessment spreadsheet should include every section and question you've asked along with a rating system weighted by your criteria. This matrix is useful for tracking vendors' scores.

A qualitative assessment is equally as important. Although subjective, this spreadsheet helps determine your overall feel for vendors' responses. How well do the vendors under-stand your business requirements? Are the outsourcers flexible? How well do they understand your business? An outsourcing vendor that doesn't understand your needs will prove unsatisfactory over the term of the contract.

Writing an RFP: Step 4
Evaluating vendor bids.

Hopefully you'll get a chance to catch your breath while waiting for proposals to trickle in, because in a few weeks you'll have a stack of proposals to pore through. Grab the stack of proposals from your desk, start reading and complete your assessment forms. It's often best to read the vendor's bid more than once before grading. After grading, wait a day or two and grade the proposal again. You'll be surprised how your grades change.

Compile a list of questions for the vendor as you read through each bid. Did the vendor commit to 100% availability on the WAN? Doesn't that seem to be just a bit of an exaggeration? If an answer doesn't make sense, the vendor may have misunderstood the question.

Give vendors a chance to clarify their proposals, either in print or in person. You may choose to submit your questions to each vendor and request a written response, or you may choose to submit your questions and have vendors address them at their proposal presentation.

If a vendor is still claiming 100% WAN availability, you should probably place that proposal in the circular file. But if the vendor provides a satisfactory explanation for its claim, include the response in your vendor assessment. As you near the end of the assessment and question phase, you should have a very good idea which vendors can capably meet your needs.

The vendor presentations should be the icing on the cake and used as a final qualitative assessment of the candidates.

If none of the proposals meet your network requirements, your RFP efforts still haven't gone to waste. You may choose to only outsource the components of the RFP that vendors can meet. For example, if you often need to change your WAN addressing structure or router con-figurations with little notice, it might not be feasible to outsource router management. However, you still may want to outsource dial-up remote access to a provider that will handle hardware, software, dial-up access and security.

In any case, the RFP exercise will give you a comprehensive understanding of the network functions that are strategic to your business and can't be outsourced, as well as the tactical functions that make good outsourcing candidates.

Writing an RFP: Step 5
Final tasks, final choices.

Before you sign the outsourcing contract with your chosen vendor or vendors, address all the p's and q's.

• Review the processes - Take a final look at your vendor's implementation, escalation, management, ticketing and billing processes. Make sure these meet your needs.

• Meet the people - Visit the outsourcer's management center and meet the people who will manage your network. Do they seem overworked? Are they trained to sup-port your specific network configuration?

• Get it on paper - Review the contract, paying special attention SLAs and how the vendor's reporting will indicate compliance or noncompliance.

• Ask questions - Keep asking questions until you're satisfied.

• Look for quality - Look for quality in the outsourcer's systems, tools and personnel. If the vendor hasn't made the required investment, your service will suffer.

By now, you and your chosen outsourcing vendor should have an understanding of each other's needs and capabilities, systems and personnel. There will be bumps along the way, but, with commitment and perseverance, the relationship should prove to be beneficial for both parties.

Hey - why are you still carrying that beeper? Isn't that someone else's problem now?