San Luis Obispo County

Agency – San Luis Obispo County

Interviewee – Susan Pittaway, IT Project Manager

Interview Date – 5/23/16

Outcome – Loss

Proposal Bid – $39,810

Proposal Date – October 2015, closed out in April 2016

Winner – CivicLive

Participants in onsite presentation and demo – Reed and Robert

Susan said the selection team thought “our presentation was horrible” (direct quote)
They had provided a script that each company was supposed to follow, so we should have known in advance what was expected and what we were going to be rated on (see attached)
Susan said that Vision did not follow the script and that she had to stop our team to get they back on track
She claimed that it appeared that we could only do about 50% of what was in our proposal responses; and gave kudos to Robert and said he was “good at answering questions”
They also got the impression that Vision was going to do it the way we wanted without listening to what SLO County wanted

Susan managed the RFP process, contract negotiations and will be the lead on the project
Received 8 responses, and 5 made the shortlist – but she didn’t say who else was on the shortlist
CivicLive – why they won:
- More simple than their current tool
- Proposal covered an unlimited number of pages for migration (our proposal was limited in terms of migration)
- Overall price was cheaper too
Other things they saw during the process that they liked included:
- Drag and drop
- WCAG compliance ease
We received strong recommendation from our work with San Luis Obispo
RFP seemed to suggest that they were looking for an open source solution

Make sure we understand the process that the onsite presentation and demo is to take, and that we understand how the evaluation process/scoring
Prepare and know what was answered in RFP reply
We need to make sure people understand our approach to content strategy and that migrating everything from old system does not make sense