Understanding Government Contract Source Selection

Writing Evaluation Factors

Recall from Chapter 2 that evaluation factors and subfactors, and the determination of their relative importance, are part of the source selection plan. The evaluation factors and their relative order of importance illustrate the government’s priorities. For example, if the most important evaluation factor is price, that means the agency is not willing (or able) to pay more for higher quality.

In every RFP, the contracting officer (CO) must include the evaluation criteria and state the relative order of importance for each criterion. This chapter will help the reader understand the mandatory evaluation factors and explains ...