With their approach to the RFP, by going over and above just responding to the questions, TopDown showed that they knew their stuff...

However, it can be quite risky, especially for smaller projects, to show too much detail and expose significant aspects of the hard-earned experience in the initial responses. There is a strong possibility that the potential client might seek the lowest price option and hand over all of the key value added information to that vendor for implementation.

Pbviously this is not applicable in a project of this size... but certainly there are many organizations (state and local governments appear to be the worst offenders in this regard) that will put out RFPs and then not award them, but use all of the information gained for their internal project teams...

The fact that the project was successful also indicates that the original RFP was well scoped and properly defined....