Mobile app development is a convenient process of establishing a business or company. Several types of software development website building and other works are done by IT professionals and different IT companies. Different companies have different kinds of styles to work to build or complete a project conveniently. However, professionalism is essential no matter what type of work you do. In the case of mobile app development, RFP-Request for Proposal is a convenient method to use. If you are doing mobile app development company, a request for proposal is an excellent method to modernize an existing product. It is necessary to fill out the RFP for a better working process. As a mobile app development company, it is necessary to work professionally, where several businesses may purchase mobile app development services from you. A mobile app RFP is convenient, where the businesses get several RFP from the different vendors. Also, they can select a development partner through the RFP, which best meets the criteria of the mobile app development project, concerning both experience and budget. Through a mobile app RFP, you can comfortably get all the ideas of the project and its working process. A well-written RFP will help you to impress the business owners conveniently
In this comprehensive guide, we are going to describe how to write an effective mobile app RFP. A customizable mobile app RFP provides the basic structure of the project. Here, we are going to convey the excellent template of the RFP to communicate what your company needs.
What is an RFP?
RFP means Request for Proposal. An RFP document is also well-known as a business document. However, these types of documents are created by both the business owners and the vendors. In simple words, RFP-Request for Proposal is business offerings from others you want to buy. If you want to develop mobile apps for your company, you need to create and circulate a document asking other android app development companies for asking to submit proposals to you. As per the RFP, a company gets more proposals regarding their project from several companies, where they will bid on the same project consistently. Therefore, an RFP is essential to get a clear idea about the working project and ultimately select the best company for the job.
The Essentiality of an RFP
Sending or receiving a proposal is a professional way of talking regarding a project. When you are sending a proposal to the vendors, it means you are choosing the best company where they can comfortably complete your work. However, an RFP is the best way to communicate with the vendors and business owners. For a better working process, a well-written RFP should come with the best possible information on project goals, criteria for vendor selection, desired functionality, including the project deadline, selection process, and contact information with other essential details. That is the way an RFP helps to identify the good and bad things regarding a project, where you can make the best decision with a nice structure. The quality of an RFP describes the quality of a project proposal, where the business owners can make the comparison with other RFPs to select the best working partner for themselves. A poorly written RFP is not preferable to receive responses from the business owners. Therefore, you need to write a convenient RFP with all the desired details, and it will increase your chances to get the project conveniently.
What Does a Mobile App RFP Include?
The development process of a mobile app requires several processes. The software engineers have to work as per the software requirements and working functionalities. However, there are two ways to write an RFP for a project. The first half of an RFP is completed by a company or the project owner. Also, the second half is done by the selected vendors.
However, as a project owner, your company needs to fill up the first half of an RFP, which contains the following sections below.
Executive Summary
Company Information
Project Description
Project Scope Requirements
Budget
Project Timeline
Proposal Timeline
Other Project Related Essential Details
These are the following sections that you need to follow as a company while writing an RFP for mobile app development or other projects.
The second half of an RFP includes the following sections below.
Company Overview
Service Offerings
Development Lifecycle Philosophy
Case Studies
Proposal
Budget
Project Timeline
Appendix
Other Project Related Details
These are the sections where you need to describe while writing an RFP for your mobile app development project. As a company or project owner, you need to follow the first half, whereas the second half is preferable for the vendors to complete.
The Step By Step Writing Process of Mobile App RFP
You need to go through several processes to write a mobile app development RFP. If you want to write a convenient mobile app RFP, it is necessary to follow a well-structured writing technique to highlight your entire project efficiently. However, the first half of an RFP needs to be completed by you as a company or project owner.
The Part-1 for a Mobile App RFP
Executive Summary
First of all, you need to write an executive summary as per your business and working project. Here, it is essential to provide a summary of your business or company, where you need to highlight the business case, including the mobile app product with the required solution. It is necessary to highlight your organization to the executive summary.
Company Information
In this phase, it is essential to add your company information as per the working activities that your company does. Here, you need to highlight your company by providing extensive details of your service or working policies. It is crucial to provide a high level of overview of your organization. A brief discussion of your organization is crucial to provide regarding the working activities of your services. Here, you can add why your company exists. Also, what are the problems your company is trying to solve? You can also describe what products or services your company provides to its consumers. Also, add the operational process of your business to what industry or market this organization operates in. It is also essential to add about the key stakeholders, including the internal project leads about the organization.
Project Summary
You need to add the project summary of your business. It is essential to provide a brief description of the project summary. Here, you need to include as much as details of your project and its required solution. For example, if you want to develop a mobile app for your business to handle your services easily, you have to add all the desired requirements here. This stage is preferable to add the core business or customer problem of your mobile app solution, where you intend to do convenient solutions with all the requirements.
The Project Summary of a business includes the following factors below.
Problem Summary
Goals & Success Criteria
Functionality
Use Cases
Stakeholders
Problem Summary
You have to highlight all the problems regarding your project that you want to do solutions with desired requirements. It is necessary to describe your core business or customer problem, where you want to do the mobile app solutions with the requirements.
Here, you have added your business objectives regarding the project, including the vision of your project. It is also essential to highlight the target audience and users of the application. You can also provide preliminary user personas with the user's goals and challenges. Also, you can describe the beneficial sides of the app. In the case of an existing app, if it requires re-development, you can add the difficulties, other navigational factors, and so on. Also, you need to convey whether it will be a mobile-only solution or it is going to be a larger project. Additionally, you can also discuss other specific factors regarding project difficulties and problems.
Goals & Success Criteria
It is also necessary to add the project goals and success criteria regarding its solution. For a better understanding, you can explain the criteria, metrics, and benchmarks of your mobile app, which will determine the success of your mobile app solution.
Here, you can also add the following factors below.
- You can add the quantifiable business goals.
- You can highlight your user/download goals.
- It is also essential to add goals for three months, six months, and a year post-launch regarding the working project.
- For measuring all these goals, what do you intend to do regarding the project?
Functionality
In this phase, you have to explain as many functionalities as you can regarding the mobile app development project. You also need to describe the core functionality of the mobile app. For all of this information regarding the project, you have to add possibly the end-to-end mobile app solution where you are looking to develop the project.
Here, you can add the following sections below.
- What are the features and functions of the app required to perform?
- What are the essential features required to create the needed functionality?
- You can also include a prioritized list of features.
- If necessary, you can also include the user journeys, wireframes, and mockups for the solution regarding the project.
- You can also add a clickable app prototype for better understanding.
User Cases
For a better working process, you can add the user cases of the mobile app. You can highlight from the start to finish of the project. You can also add how users can interact with the developed mobile app.
Stakeholders
It is essential to add about the stakeholders of your working project. Here, you need to describe who are the project decision-makers and key leaders regarding this entire solution. Also, who is the specific leader of the project, and who will lead the project daily? You also need to include the level of involvement of other stakeholders in the project.
Project Scope and Requirements
The project scope and requirements are a significant part of the mobile app development solution. Here, you need to add all the essential details about the project regarding the project measurement and requirements.
However, you have to add the following factors below.
- Service
- Platforms
- Back-end
- Push Notifications
- Analytics
These are the sections that need to be added to the project scope and requirements.
Service
In this phase, you need to discuss your service as per the project requirements. You can include the services you require for this solution. However, you can add the consulting and product strategy if this is necessary to include. You can also add the development, design, and user experience. Additionally, do not forget to add the quality assurance, testing, and technical delivery phases.
Platforms
Adding the platforms is crucial regarding your mobile app development project. Several types of platforms are available, and you have to add what platforms will be built on regarding this solution.
You can add the platforms like;
It is also necessary to explain which one will be your main priority to develop this project. The number of mobile app development platforms will affect several factors like timeframe, resources, target audience, budget, and so on. For several platforms, it will directly impact the budget of the development project. The multiple platforms of a development project require different codebases and software engineers with different backgrounds and skillsets, which will also increase the development cost.
Backend
If you have existing systems like web services or CMS, you can describe them here. If your system has available APIs and documentation to access, it will be splendid to add them at this stage. If you are required for the vendor to develop web services or APIs, it is better to include them. You can also speak about the current databases like Oracle, Salesforce, MongoDB, etc.
Push Notifications
You can discuss the push notifications if you want this to be your solution. Also, you can add the strategies to customize push notification content, including the frequency you need to send push notifications to the users.
Analytics
If you require analytics for your solution, you can add it here. Also, you need to add what kind of data you want to collect by using the analytics.
Budget
Budget is a significant aspect of mobile app development. You need to add the budget as per the working process of your project. However, the budget of a mobile app development solution depends on two primary factors: work size and quality. You have to count the budget as per the scope of your project platforms, features, functions, and user flows. Also, the working activities and quality affect the solution cost, which depends on the experience of vendors. Setting a budget to the RFP will allow you to receive the exact expectations for the project from the vendors. It will also help the vendors what services can offer as per the business goals and requirements.
Project Timeline
It is necessary to provide the project timeline regarding the solution. Here, you have to add the due date of your project launch. If there are any dates related to an event to the launching date, add them here. You can also include if any dependencies influence the project launch date. It is also essential to add when the mobile app development will start, including the expected date and how long the project will take to complete.
Proposal Timeline
You have to provide a due date for proposals to be submitted by the vendors. You can also include if there is the evaluation of proposals required with shortlisted presentations and the selection of winning bidder.
Part-2 for a Mobile App RFP
Section-2 of a mobile app RFP will be completed by the vendor. Here, you need to add the following factors below.
Company Overview
Here, you have to provide a brief description of your company, including the leadership and your executive team members. Here, you need to let the business owners or project owners know how long the company has been in business with its mission. You can also include how your company will provide value to this project regarding the other competitors. You can discuss the size of your company, which can include the sizes of the development, design, quality assurance, product, and project management team. Additionally, you can also add about your employees where they are located and is there any work that will be done from overseas.
Service Offerings
You have to add all the services regarding this project that your company is going to offer.
You can provide a brief description of consulting, product strategy, development, QA, UX, maintenance, and future-proofing.
Development Lifecycle
You need to add the mobile app development lifecycle. Here, you have to add all the essential processes regarding the mobile app development of the project.
- You can include the development philosophy your company will follow.
- What are the reasons for selecting that kind of development philosophy?
- Who is the owner of the code?
- Add the metrics that your company did to refine or improve it.
- Add the coding standards with their best practices.
Case Studies
You provide the work experiences that you have done before with a list of clients, awards, and summaries of client projects. You can also summarize all the solutions with their results.
Proposal
Please provide a brief description of the product being built.
Here, you have to include;
- Who is going to be involved in this project?
- What are the resources you will use?
- How you will tackle the requirements listed above, including the weekly cost of the team.
- Please describe the tools you will use for product management, project management, communication, and development.
- You can describe the key features by providing a summary.
- What are the platforms you will use regarding this solution?
Project Scope
You can provide a brief description with comments and concerns about the supplied project scope. Also, you can describe the proposed timeline, budget, and project risks.
Project Timeline
You can discuss the project timeline regarding the requirements and working processes. Here, you need to explain the estimated start dates, schedule of activities, deliverables, and resources.
Pricing Model
You can provide a summary regarding the pricing model of the mobile app solution project. Here, you can explain the project time, scope, and weekly team costs.
Maintenance & Support Plan
It is the stage of providing maintenance and support after the compilation of the project. Here, you explain the type of service, level of supporting plans, with services and costs.
Conclusion
An RFP is necessary for both vendors and project owners. For writing the best RFP, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of your end-to-end product strategy. It is preferable to fully define your product before you start writing a Mobile App RFP. You can create a list where you are prioritized features with a visual solution of UX and a clickable prototype. All of the following sections that we discussed above are necessary to write a convenient RFP to impress the project owners. These details will help you to create the best mobile app development RFP with the increasing chances to impress the project owners. We hope you find this article well and get all the information on how to write an effective mobile app RFP.
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