“All employees can reserve the general-purpose meeting rooms” is requirement (3) itself. It states who may reserve those rooms — the range of users and the reservation privileges — which is the core of the reservation system's functional requirements. It is a typical business requirement that should be written in an RFP and is therefore an appropriate description, so it is not the answer to this question, which asks for the inappropriate one.
×Incorrectイ
“Multiple departments, such as the sales, general affairs, accounting, and information systems departments, share the use of the meeting rooms” corresponds to requirement (1), the business premise and usage pattern after the offices are consolidated. Because the same meeting rooms will be used across departments, this connects directly to requirements such as how availability is searched, how reservation conflicts are handled, and how many users and how many reservations are expected. It is information the vendor needs in order to grasp the shape and scale of the business, so writing it in is appropriate.
×Incorrectウ
An RFP is a document that invites proposals for the target of the procurement — here, the reservation system. The system's delivery date and operating date are premises for the proposal content and the estimate, so they must be stated. On the other hand, the meeting rooms' interior finishing work and furniture/fixture delivery are carried out by the meeting rooms' construction contractor, not by the system vendor, and lie outside the scope of the reservation system procurement. There is no need to write in schedules that fall outside that scope, so this description is appropriate.
○エ
正解This question belongs to sub-question group C, whose instruction reads “Read the following description about the preparation of a request for proposal (hereafter, RFP) and answer the four questions.” The introduction sets up the situation: trading company P has decided to consolidate its offices, which are scattered across several buildings, into a single location, and employee B, in their second year with the company, has become the person in charge of introducing a meeting room reservation system. The [Requirements for meeting room reservations] list the following four points. (1) Multiple departments — sales, general affairs, accounting, information systems, and others — will share the meeting rooms after the consolidation. (2) The meeting rooms are divided into general-purpose meeting rooms and guest (VIP) meeting rooms. (3) All employees can reserve the general-purpose meeting rooms. (4) For guest (VIP) meeting rooms, whether a reservation is allowed is decided by the employee's job title, but the criteria for that decision have not been determined yet.
An RFP (Request For Proposal) is a document that the client prepares in order to convey accurately to vendors what kind of system it wants — the requirements, assumptions, constraints, delivery date, and so on — and thereby draw out proposals that can be compared with one another. Since the purpose is to convey information accurately, unfavorable information and undecided matters must not be concealed.
Choice エ says that, because the criteria in requirement (4) are not yet decided, the very fact that the criteria differ from those for the general-purpose meeting rooms should not be written in the RFP. However, who decides whether a reservation is allowed, and how, is a fork in the design that determines whether the system needs a mechanism for judging privileges by job title. If the vendor is not told that the way of judging differs by type of meeting room, it will assume that all meeting rooms follow the same rule and will estimate functions, work hours, and costs on that basis; when it later turns out that judgment by job title is required, this invites added specifications, rework, extra costs, and delivery delays.
For undecided matters, the correct way to write an RFP is not to hide them but to state clearly that “this is undecided at present” and “it is scheduled to be decided by such-and-such a time.” Then the vendor can build the privilege-judging mechanism into its design and submit a proposal that also covers how it will respond once the criteria are fixed and what the cost conditions would be. Therefore choice エ, which says not to describe it, is the inappropriate description, and the correct answer is エ.
ここがポイント
An RFP (Request For Proposal) is a document that the client prepares in order to convey business requirements, assumptions, constraints, delivery dates, selection conditions, and the like to vendors accurately, so as to draw out the best and mutually comparable proposals. Because the purpose is to convey information accurately, it is wrong to trim the requirements down to a bare minimum, or to conceal unfavorable information or vague points.
As a rule, requirements that are not yet fixed should not be concealed; instead, state clearly that they are not yet fixed. Hiding vague points throws off the vendor's assumptions and becomes a cause of later specification changes, extra costs, and delivery delays. Conversely, matters outside the scope of the procurement, such as interior finishing work or furniture/fixture delivery, do not need to be written in; the scope of what an RFP describes should be decided in line with the procurement scope.