September 21, 2026 – Choosing an integrated workplace management system (IWMS) may look like a software purchase, but it’s actually an operational strategy that outlasts the people who signed off on it. Get the request for proposal (RFP) process wrong, and you don’t just end up with a mediocre tool — you end up with years of workarounds, unplanned budget overruns, and a campus community that never fully adopts the new system. Get it right, and the same process becomes the foundation for how your institution manages space, maintenance, real estate, and sustainability commitments for the next decade.
The gap between those two outcomes largely comes down to how the RFP was built, and how much thought went into it before the first vendor ever saw it.
The IWMS RFP guide walks campus leaders (facilities, space, real estate, and IT) through the parts of the RFP process that are too expensive to skip. Here’s what’s inside:
- Start with an honest operational assessment. Facilities teams manage maintenance and space through processes built up over decades of incremental fixes. Academic departments book rooms and report issues through channels that bypass central facilities entirely. Mapping that fragmentation, including the spreadsheets and side channels nobody mentions in steering committee meetings, is what turns a generic requirements list into one that surfaces the integration gaps that actually matter.
- Build an evaluation framework that reflects your campus’s risk. Functional fit, technical compatibility, and implementation support each deserve their own weighting, and the guide explains how to set it based on what’s riskiest for your institution.
- Get demos and reference checks that go beyond the surface. Build demo scripts that force an apples-to-apples comparison instead of letting vendors run their own polished walkthrough, and bring facilities, IT, financial, and academic stakeholders into the same demo so each group evaluates through its own lens. For reference checks, ask about timeline adherence, how the vendor handled change management, and what broke six months after go-live.
- Use ready-to-go templates. Organizational overview templates, functional requirements checklists, cloud deployment and security templates for IT, and budget frameworks that normalize licensing models so you can compare vendors on total cost of ownership instead of headline pricing. Scorecards throughout make the evaluation defensible, so the final decision holds up when someone outside the selection committee asks how you got there.
- Lead the process, not just the procurement. Most RFP guides stop at vendor selection. This one covers stakeholder communication tailored to executives, department heads, and end users; timelines that respect academic calendars and IT resource windows; and how to build change champions in facilities, IT, and academic departments before you’ve even selected a vendor.
Who it’s for: facilities, real estate, space, and IT leaders heading into an IWMS selection, or trying to course-correct one that’s already underway.
What you’ll walk away with:
- A structure for assessing your institution honestly before drafting requirements
- A weighted evaluation framework you can defend to any stakeholder
- Demo scripts and reference-check questions that surface real vendor performance
- Templates for requirements, budget, and implementation planning
- A communication and change management plan that starts before the contract is signed
Download the Higher Education Leader’s Guide to IWMS RFP Success from Planon for the full RFP framework, evaluation scorecards, and implementation planning tools you can put to use right away, whether you’re starting from a blank page or refining an RFP that’s already begun.
