Two documents, doing different jobs
There is a template and there is an instrument, and confusing them is the origin of most bad advice in this area. The template is the World Bank's Standard Request for Proposals, a public document that sets out the forms, the instructions to consultants and the clauses that do not change. The instrument is the request for proposals a particular client actually sent you, produced by filling that template in. The template says so explicitly about its own guidance text, which is set in italics and is meant to be gone by the time you see the document.
The text shown in Italics is “Notes to the Client”. It provides guidance to the entity in preparing a specific RFP. “Notes to the Client” should be deleted from the final RFP issued to the shortlisted Consultants.
- Standing rule
- The Standard Request for Proposals is derived from the Master Procurement Document agreed between participating multilateral development banks, which is why an AfDB or IsDB technical proposal has a familiar shape.
- Our reading, not a rule
- Teams that keep a single “World Bank checklist” from an old bid tend to carry a previous client's filled-in blanks into a new tender without noticing. We see this often enough to treat the checklist itself as a risk, but that is our observation, not a finding in any procurement document.
Where the standard document says it does not apply
Before generalising anything from the Standard RFP, it is worth reading the paragraph in which the document limits its own reach. It is not the governing text for every World Bank–financed consulting selection. Several whole categories sit outside it, and for smaller assignments it may be used in part and simplified further. A rule quoted from this document and applied to a US$120,000 Consultant's Qualifications selection is being applied to a process the document does not claim to govern.
The use of this SRFP is not required for selections conducted under commercial practice, use of country systems, selection of individual consultants, and in the case of entering into an agreement with a UN agency in a format approved by the Bank. For Selection Based on Consultant's Qualifications (“CQS”) or any selection method costing less than US$300,000 equivalent relevant elements of this SRFP may be used and further simplified for the purpose of a particular assignment.
Seven forms, and the three that disappear
Section 3 of the Standard RFP opens with a checklist of required forms, with separate columns for a Full Technical Proposal and a Simplified Technical Proposal. Which of the two applies is stated in the Data Sheet of your tender, not decided by you. The difference is not a matter of length. Three form families are marked for the Full proposal only, and in the Simplified proposal their content is folded into a differently structured TECH-4:
- TECH-1 — Technical Proposal Submission Form. Required for both.
- TECH-1 Attachment — a letter of intent to form a joint venture, or a copy of an existing agreement. Marked “if applicable”.
- Power of Attorney — no pre-set format. A joint venture needs several: one for the authorized representative of each member, and one for the lead member's representative to represent all members.
- TECH-2, with parts 2A Consultant's Organization and 2B Consultant's Experience — Full proposal only.
- TECH-3, with parts 3A on the Terms of Reference and 3B on counterpart staff and facilities — Full proposal only.
- TECH-4 — approach, methodology and work plan. Required for both, but the suggested structure differs between them.
- TECH-5 — work schedule and planning for deliverables. Required for both.
- TECH-6 — team composition, key expert inputs, and attached CVs. Required for both.
- TECH-7 — Code of Conduct (ES). Required for both.
Most of what teams repeat as “the World Bank rule” is a blank that a particular client filled in. The standard document is mostly a set of empty boxes and the instructions for filling them.
There is no World Bank page limit
The checklist of required forms has a Page Limit column. In the standard document that column is empty for every single form. There is therefore no standing World Bank page limit to know, memorise or design a template around — the column exists so that a client can impose one for its own tender. If your request for proposals states a limit, that limit is real and binding for that tender. If a colleague tells you the World Bank limit is some particular number, they are repeating a figure from a document they once read.
- Standing rule
- The Page Limit column exists on the checklist of required forms and is blank in the standard document.
- Set by each tender
- Any actual page limit, and which forms it applies to, comes from the tender you were sent.
Work your people did elsewhere is not your firm's experience
This is the rule most often broken, usually without any intent to mislead. A firm hires an experienced person, that person ran a comparable assignment at a previous employer, and the assignment quietly appears in the firm's own experience table. Form TECH-2B forecloses it in terms that leave no interpretive room, and it says where that experience does legitimately belong instead — in the individual's CV. It also warns that the claim may have to be substantiated on request, which is the difference between a table a firm can fill in and a table a firm can defend.
List only those assignments for which the Consultant was legally contracted by the Client as a company or was one of the joint venture partners. Assignments completed by the Consultant's individual experts working privately or through other consulting firms cannot be claimed as the relevant experience of the Consultant, or that of the Consultant's partners or sub-consultants, but can be claimed by the Experts themselves in their CVs. The Consultant should be prepared to substantiate the claimed experience by presenting copies of relevant documents and references if so requested by the Client.
The experience table asks for money, not just names
The TECH-2B table has five columns: duration, assignment name with a brief description of the main deliverables, the name of the client and the country, the approximate contract value in US dollar equivalent together with the amount paid to your firm, and your role on the assignment. Two of those are routinely the reason a submission stalls. The contract value has to be expressed in US dollar equivalent, which means someone has to decide and defend a conversion for a contract signed years ago in another currency. And where the work was done in a joint venture, the total value and your own share are asked for separately — a firm that has only ever recorded the headline figure cannot answer the second half.
- Standing rule
- The five columns, the US dollar equivalent, and the separate “amount paid to your firm” are printed in the standard form itself.
- Set by each tender
- How many years of past assignments count is a blank in the form — it reads “completed in the last [.....] years”, and the tender supplies the number.
Do not copy the terms of reference back at the client
Form TECH-4 carries an instruction that is short, underlined in the original, and ignored constantly: do not repeat or copy the terms of reference into the methodology. Restating the client's own requirements back to them consumes the space where an evaluator is looking for an approach, and where a page limit applies it consumes it twice over. The same form asks for an explanation of your understanding of the objectives, the technical approach, and the methodology you would adopt — three things, none of which is a summary of what was already sent to you.
Please do not repeat/copy the TORs in here.
- Standing rule
- Section 3's notes to the consultant, shown in braces, are guidance for preparing the proposal and should not appear on the proposal you submit.
The suggested structure is genuinely only suggested
Form TECH-4 offers a structure — technical approach and methodology, work plan, organization and staffing — and introduces it with the word suggested, in the same braces that mark guidance rather than obligation. The Simplified version of the same form suggests a different set of three: technical approach, methodology and organization of the team; work plan and staffing; and comments on the terms of reference and on counterpart staff and facilities. Two things follow. A firm that treats the Full structure as mandatory headings will produce a Simplified proposal with the wrong sections; and a firm that departs from the suggestion for good reason is not being non-responsive, though it should be sure the evaluation criteria in its own Data Sheet can still be found easily by a committee reading against them.
TECH-5 asks for a bar chart
The work schedule form is more prescriptive than most teams expect. It wants deliverables broken down into the activities required to produce them, together with other benchmarks such as the client's approvals, and for phased assignments it wants activities, report delivery and benchmarks shown separately for each phase. It then states the presentation format outright, and asks for a legend where one is needed to read the chart. This is also the form TECH-6's time inputs have to agree with, since the same deliverables carry the person-months.
List the deliverables with the breakdown for activities required to produce them and other benchmarks such as the Client's approvals. For phased assignments, indicate the activities, delivery of reports, and benchmarks separately for each phase. Duration of activities shall be indicated in the form of a bar chart. Include a legend, if necessary, to help read the chart.
What the submission form makes the firm declare
TECH-1 is a letter, and it is easy to treat as a cover page. It is the place where the firm makes a series of declarations, and three of them have real consequences. The firm declares that everything in the proposal is true and accepts that misrepresentation may lead to disqualification and to sanction by the Bank. It declares that neither it nor its sub-consultants, subcontractors, suppliers or service providers is under temporary suspension or debarment by the World Bank Group — including debarment recognised under the mutual enforcement agreement between the World Bank and other development banks, which is how a sanction imposed elsewhere reaches a World Bank tender. And it commits the firm to negotiating on the basis of the key experts it proposed.
Except as stated in the Data Sheet, Clause 12.7, we undertake to negotiate a Contract on the basis of the proposed Key Experts. We accept that the substitution of Key Experts for reasons other than those stated in ITC Clause 12 and ITC Clause 28.4 may lead to the termination of Contract negotiations.
- Standing rule
- A proposal from a joint venture attaches a letter of intent or the joint venture agreement, signed by every participating member, confirming joint and severable liability.
- Standing rule
- All pages of the original technical and financial proposal are initialled by the same authorized representative who signs the proposal.
Almost every number you want is a blank
The Data Sheet is where a tender becomes specific, and it is the part of the document that practitioner advice most often generalises from. Reading the standard version is instructive precisely because the values are missing. Under quality- and cost-based selection the formula for the financial score is fixed, but the weights given to the technical and financial proposals are blanks the client inserts, subject only to their summing to one. The minimum technical score, the proposal validity period, the currency of conversion, the source of the exchange rate and its date, the number of years of experience that count, the expected date for contract negotiations — all of them are set per tender. None of them is a World Bank number.
- Standing rule
- Under QCBS the lowest evaluated financial proposal receives a financial score of 100, and combined ranking is the technical score times its weight plus the financial score times its weight.
- Set by each tender
- The technical and financial weights themselves, and the minimum technical score, are inserted by the client in the Data Sheet.
- Set by each tender
- The exchange-rate date is constrained rather than fixed: not earlier than four weeks before the submission deadline, and no later than the expiry of proposal validity.
How to read the labels on this page
Everything above is marked as one of three things, because the three behave differently and mixing them is how bad procurement folklore spreads. A standing rule is printed in the published standard document and holds wherever that document is used. A per-tender value is a blank the client fills in, and is binding for that tender and meaningless outside it. Our own reading is neither: it is what we have observed about how firms get caught, offered as a judgement and labelled so you can discount it. Where we could not verify something, it is not on this page at all.
- Standing rule
- Printed in the World Bank's published Standard Request for Proposals, with the clause or form given.
- Set by each tender
- A value your own request for proposals sets. Check it there; do not carry it between tenders.
- Our reading, not a rule
- ProposalOS's reading of what tends to go wrong. Useful, we think, but not authority.
What this page does not settle
Every clause here comes from one edition of one document: the Standard Request for Proposals for the selection of consulting firms, January 2020. The Bank publishes other request-for-proposals documents, including streamlined variants, and editions are revised. Nothing here describes the World Bank's own corporate hiring of consultants, which runs on a different system and different forms — a distinction worth checking before you follow advice found under a search for “consulting for the World Bank”. And nothing here tells you what your evaluation committee will actually weight, because that is in your Data Sheet. For the comparison across financiers, we keep a separate maintained reference.
Primary sources
- World Bank, Standard Request for Proposals: Selection of Consultants (January 2020)Foreword ¶¶1, 3, 5; ITC 15.1, 15.2; Data Sheet 25.1, 26.1, 27.1; Section 3 checklist of required forms and Forms TECH-1 to TECH-6
Quotations are reproduced from the published document at the date shown above. Procurement documents are revised, and the request for proposals you receive governs your bid — check the clause in your own tender before relying on it.