Request for RFP Advice

The description that you provide is a little confusing. You mention putting together an RFP but want to manage a project. An RFP is traditionally used to find suppliers or vendors to provide a product, service, or carry out a body of work. I'm not aware of any standard RFP template that is globally used, although different organizations may have their own template.

When defining the work in an RFP for an agile environment, I would recommend a statement of objectives over a statement of work. Instead of defining scope and schedule, the statement of objectives focuses on purpose, desired objectives, and service metrics that are expected.

Something that is concerning me, though, is that you want to "manage a project". In my experiences, the entity that creates the RFP is the customer. The management of the effort should be left to the vendor within the agreement.

Hi Thomas, Thank you for your reply. I apologize for being confusing. 

I understand that RFP's differ wildly but what I am trying to understand is a more agile way of creating an RFP document. I see a lot of information on how to do the selection process and the agile contract and many things involved in the procurement/selection process. However I don't see a good clear way to create a short RFP that follows the precepts of agile: Collaboration over Contract Negotiation. We don't want to make a 20 page document as thats not a valuable product. But I am unsure of what should be included in it vs a standard RFP and what should be removed and look to the experts like yourself for some advice. 

As well lets remove the word "manage" from this conversation as it can be ambiguous and allow me to rephrase. If we are engaging a development partner to perform the development would you not recommend that the Product Owner and, if an experienced one is available, the scrum master be from the clients side? Would it not be possible to engage our partner to provide the development experience only? 

The idea of "collaboration over contract negotiation" doesn't mean that there aren't contracts. The meaning of this agile value is to simply favor working together over voluminous legal documents that attempt to define all of the various possibilities. In the agile world, contracts should define how the involved entities will work together and consider the iterative and incremental design and delivery model. More traditional contracts try to define everything - costs, delivery deadlines, the scope of work - upfront, and this doesn't work in domains that have higher amounts of uncertainty and ambiguity.

As far as RFPs go, focus on the objectives. Rather than specifying what you want to build, specify the outcomes and objectives that a solution or set of solutions would enable you to achieve. A statement of objectives is an alternative to a statement of work that defines specific deliverables and requirements.

For the team organization, no - I wouldn't recommend that the Product Owner or Scrum Master come from the client side. I would not enforce any particular methodology on the supplier. The use of methodology may be a factor in evaluating the responses to your RFP. I would expect that the supplier describes the methodology by which they will meet your objectives defined in the RFP and provide the resources that enable them to do so. The methodology that the vendor wishes to use may be a factor in selecting a vendor. I wouldn't necessarily preclude the idea that the client provides a Product Owner, but I would expect the relationship to be described in the contract.

My online research has not pulled up a good example of how to proceed with an agile RFP nor a template for the actual agile RFP document.

Do you have an agile contract, or at least the heads of terms for one, which you would present to the successful party? I suggest starting there, and framing an RFP accordingly.