BidResponses
I'm at the stage in my career when I get to see a lot of bids and responses to bids. I've sent out requests for tenders, I've assessed the responses and I've also written responses to bids that we are going for. The main thing I've learned from this is that one should always answer the question. Not what you would like the question to be, but what it actually is. As a corollary to this, when writing a question you should phrase it in such a way as to elicit the answer you are looking for. There's not much point in dancing around the point, you'll only get irrelevant answers.
There is one thing that I consider pretty unacceptable in a response to a technical bid. Unmitigated woffle. Consider the following gem:
"...public services in general have a mandate to leverage the egalitarian dynamic of electronic communications to communicate and transact with the public."
I pretty much stopped reading at that point. I mean, I know what their point was supposed to be (though personally I don't consider electronic communications to be especially egalitarian, unlike mobile phones for instance...). It was just that I was expecting this document to contain estimated prices and specifications for firewall configurations, licences, proxies and so on.
I'd talked to these people; had meetings with them, shown them spreadsheets, Visio diagrams and given them a half-page of requirements as bullet-points. They knew I was the person who would be making the decision on which supplier to go with. Why did they think that 20 pages of marketing-speak was the correct response?