Breaking the Commitment Trap: Rethinking Project RFPs for Outcome Certainty
By Josh Cushner, Founder and CEO, Duplex Loop May 2025
Executive Summary
Most capital projects are launched with a Request for Proposals (RFP) that demands high levels of commitment—scope, schedule, cost—before the project is well-defined, and before critical uncertainties are resolved. This conventional approach forces owners and delivery teams into premature overcommitment, increasing project risk, inflating contingencies, and eroding trust in cost and time estimates.
A more effective strategy shifts the focus from commitment-driven RFPs to definition-driven Final Investment Decision (FIDs)—where the clarity of scope, risks, and readiness is measured and validated before locking in delivery contracts. This paper explores why conventional RFP processes fail to ensure predictable outcomes, and how a basic scorecard focused on 10 aspects of alignment necessary to mitigate the root causes of cost overruns, delays, and unmet expectations.
The DuplexLoop RFP Scorecard
In traditional project delivery models, RFPs are often issued as a signal of readiness to proceed. However, readiness is frequently assumed—not proven. Key dimensions of project definition remain vague or unresolved, such as:
Undefined scope boundaries and poorly constructed handoffs at interfaces
Ambiguous acceptance criteria and undefined success metrics
Underdeveloped risk identification and mitigation strategies
Overly hopeful resource capacity assessments and supply chain readiness
Large definition-debts in technical or operational risk lacking integration planning
Despite these gaps, RFPs demand fixed-fee proposals, committed schedules, and firm deliverables. This dynamic forces proposers to inflate contingencies, make aggressive assumptions, or shift risks back to the owner post-award—manifesting later as change orders, rework, and disputes.
Delivery Consequence
The result is a project that starts with a veneer of predictability but erodes into reactive crisis management. Cost overruns, missed schedules, and degraded quality are treated as inevitable, rather than symptoms of an avoidable upstream problem.
The Solution: Definition-Driven RFP Readiness
A Definition-Driven RFP Process ensures that commitments are only made once critical uncertainties are identified, assessed, and addressed to a predictable level. This approach focuses on:
Measuring Project Definition Completeness
Resolving Critical Uncertainties Before Commitment
Aligning Commitments to Definition Maturity
Benefits:
Reduces inflated contingencies
Improves accuracy of cost and time estimates
Builds trust between owners, designers, and builders
Supports realistic go/no-go investment decisions
Prevents scope creep and late-stage changes
Aligns teams on outcome-driven success metrics
Conclusion
The DuplexLoop RFP Scorecard tells you about the foundations of the project. Does the Owner understand the DNA of what they want to achieve; are stakeholders aligned; how risky are the custom portions of the project; etc?
In other words, this tool aims to rate the quality of the work done in pre-construction, and the risk they are entering into based on the project's current state. Using this data:
Owners can consider if more project definition is needed before issuing the RFP.
Bidders can chose to bid the highest scoring RFPs and avoid the lowest.
Owners and Bidders together can use the analysis to inform a "risk-reduction stage" which prototypes and resolves the highest priority aspects of the project definition before locking in hard bids.
Ultimately the DuplexLoop RFP Scorecard answers one critical question... "is this project ready for hard bid with reasonable risk?"
RFPs should not be a signal to proceed—they should be a test of readiness. Investing in definition before commitment is not added bureaucracy; it is the fastest way to predictable outcomes.