Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Don’t Drown

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Look! Here’s Seth, writing about management reserve.

No, wait, that’s what we call it in Proposal Land. He calls it a ledge: one that will keep you from drowning. It’s a compelling metaphor.

The ledge is a combination of time and money.
It’s the buffer between here and disaster.
The ledge is a foundation, a place we can find our footing as we think about the next steps.
And the ledge offers perspective, because we can realize that even if this moment feels momentous, it might not be.

Stop, now, and go read the whole thing.

And on your next proposal, make sure you have a ledge. Heck, on your next project of any sort, make sure you have a ledge.

Do Nothing Much

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We’ve seen how other disciplines can help us in Proposal Land:

  • with lessons on fostering teamwork, drawing on a superb article on managing design teams (start here)
  • with lessons on writing better, riffing on a-man-walks-into-a-bar variants (start here) and adapting instructions for writing haiku (see here)
  • with meeting the schedule, leveraging winter-driving instructions (see here)

Now it’s time to learn something from a botanical garden that had stagnated for lack of big funding to fund its ambitious vision.

So because we couldn’t take
the big step we wanted to,
we didn’t take any step at all.

Here’s the short version of how a team of people unstuck that garden–but the whole post by Scientist Sees Squirrel is well worth reading, and the blog (Tagline: Seldom original. Often wrong. Occasionally interesting.) is well worth your time if you have even a passing interest in the life sciences.

My friends and I decided we’d rather do something small than be stagnant. So we started to develop a new Garden bed each year, but one that we could do for $5,000 with volunteer labour. We didn’t ask anyone . . . for $100,000, because we figured first we should be able to show that we could execute a $5,000 project successfully. And guess what? After 5 years, the Garden looked fresh, new people were coming and stalwarts were returning, and we were able to think a little bigger. Now after 10 years, we’ve quadrupled our staffing and budget, our City government sees the Garden as a major asset they want to invest in, and people are flooding through. All this because we weren’t afraid to do nothing much. (emphasis added)

Two key things here:

  • They had a small group of people, able to work as a team.
  • They had an ambitious vision, but they weren’t afraid to start small: “to do nothing much.”

When our proposals are a hot mess (as they often seem to be), fixing all those interlocking processes can feel overwhelming. So don’t try. Get a small group of like-minded individuals together and fix something smaller, instead:

And so on.

Don’t be afraid to do nothing much. Day after day, week after week, year after year, “nothing much” adds up to “quite something.”

PS The suggestions for improvement that don’t have links here are all addressed in The Manual. Just sayin.’

 

Fire? Fire!

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Running into a burning building is heroic work.

Keeping buildings from burning down in the first place
is actually just as important.
And it scales more reliably.
– Seth’s Blog

I’ve worked with firefighters and with fire inspectors on proposals: literally and metaphorically. Unless the damn place/proposal is on fire, I much prefer the inspectors. Seth’s right: prevention scales more reliably than recovery.

But when things *are* on fire despite our maybe less-than-best efforts, asking “why” in that moment is not only not helpful, it makes it harder to do the work that needs to be done.

If someone can’t help with the effort to extinguish the flames, they should shut up and sit down.

There’ll be lots of time later to do the forensic analysis.

 

Better but not Perfect

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I’ve often wondered what it feels like to hook a ball out-of-bounds in front of a packed gallery, not to mention a few million TV viewers. Me, I never had that level of exposure, nor even a comparable level appropriate to my work environment. And yet, I still hated making mistakes. I hated even being mistake-adjacent.

In my first year in Proposal Land, we had been assigned a technical section based on the probable division of work assuming contract award. One response, however, was outside our area. As I gathered the responses from our own technical folks, I flagged this one question for completion by the prime contractor in another province:

XX’s input here.

When we faxed our pages to the prime (Yes, really. This was long before we even had files attached to emails. Shared online repositories were unimaginable.), I called the volume lead to tell him that we needed their input for that response. I didn’t think it was necessary, you understand, given the note in the document itself: I was just being thorough.

Typists in their organization retyped our pages into their word-processing software (I know, I know), and the whole proposal then went through a rigorous and meticulous review process with many stages. A few weeks after the submission date, we got a question from the reviewers.

What, exactly, does this mean:
“XX’s input here”?

Good lord. How many sets of eyes–typist, technical reviewers, executives–had missed that text? I was mortified but also furious.

A few years on, I understood Proposal Land a little better. By then, I had experienced more of the pressure inherent in a speed-&-feed environment. I had learned that the people scan a page more than they read it, and that an embedded note needs something (colour, font size, bolding, caps – SOMETHING!) to catch that scanning eye. I had developed better processes:

  • Submitting a complete document to a prime contractor, even if some of it had to come from the very people we were submitting it to
  • Reviewing documents against checklists

And so on. And yet, we still submitted imperfect documents. We still made mistakes. Not, perhaps, as silly or embarrassing as this one, but mistakes.

So? So read Seth’s Blog today.

Being careful is smart.
Being perfect is unattainable,
and seeking perfection is a trap.