Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

One cuts; one chooses

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Did you grow up with that rule for sharing a treat? I did, and I used it with my children, too. It seems to be the quickest way to incentivize good-faith efforts in children, and likely in many adults, also.

In the intersection of AI with Proposal Land, I suggest another rule: One does; one checks. In this case:

  • The first “one” is an AI assistant of some sort tasked with creating draft responses based on previous proposals and/or on other inputs and constraints provided to it.
  • The second “one” is a person knowledgeable in the task of responding to RFPs and in the services or goods being offered in the proposal.

There’s a great piece in The Hub today that speaks for itself, but here’s a teaser.

We are entering the era of digital interns. Like human interns, they are eager, fast, and occasionally completely wrong.

Your job as a leader isn’t to stop them from working.

It’s to ensure a human officer reviews their work before they sign the company name on the dotted line.

This Time and Next Time

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And since we all apparently agree that it’s urgent,
which is why we have the office in the first place,
it would be good to see some urgency
in not just getting the MPO running,
but in making it obsolete.
– Matt Gurney, The Line

For any American readers (and for any Canadian readers not obsessively up-to-date on Canadian political/governance dysfunction), some background.

Prime Minister Carney, elected in April in part on a campaign promise to build things on a scale and at a speed never before seen in Canada, created a new agency called the Major Projects Office (the MPO in the quote, above). Its purpose? To select “major” projects deemed (by him, apparently) to be in the “national interest” and to expedite said projects through Canada’s admittedly dysfunctional maze of regulations and reviews which, collectively, make it almost impossible to get anything with even a hint of controversy built in this country. To fast-track a lucky-few selected projects.

My immediate thought was “OK – but why not announce a parallel process to reform/reduce/simplify the approvals process for ALL projects?” Others are also asking this question, and not getting anything that looks like an answer.

We’re not going to get an answer and that sucks. But I can’t fix government and neither can you. Indeed, even if you and I pulled in the same direction, we wouldn’t likely have much effect. But here’s the thing: We can fix proposals.

We’ve all been there in the late stages of a proposal – forced to do some ugly workaround, to make some obnoxious compromise on quality or risk, to meet schedule. OK. No problem. It happens. Even more than once.

But it doesn’t have to happen indefinitely, world-without-end-amen, dagnab it. 

If you’re an executive, assign the proposal manager the task of identifying these ugly bits–places where the process is letting you down–and reporting them to you at the end so you can task someone with figuring out how to fix them.

If you’re being asked to be a proposal manager, before you accept the tasking ask the executive for the list of process improvements already made, and how you are expected to submit your recommendations.

If you’re being voluntold that you’ll be a proposal-team member, ask the proposal manager how you are expected to contribute to the ongoing task of improving corporate proposal processes.

It’s not about getting through just this one proposal. It’s about the work culture:

This time,
we do what we have to do.
Next time,
we do better.

 

Making Change Happen

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Today, Seth is primarily on about branding and advertising, but his questions are good for executives deciding which projects to chase. And for proposal teams tasked with the chase.

What do we intend to remind people of?

What genre are we playing in?

What problem do we solve?

What problem does our existence cause–for competitors, for users, for bystanders…

There are lots more. Go find the ones that make sense for your line of work, your company, your way of being in the world/market. And then answer them, in plain language.

Using an LLM in Teaching Proposal Writing

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No, I haven’t done it.  LLMs did not exist when I last worked a proposal. (Tell me how old you are . . .)

People can learn by doing, and one good way to illustrate how to write well is to expose writers and editors to bad proposal responses and to get them to improve the writing. Here’s the problem. You can’t use a bad example within a company without potentially humiliating the author. Neither can you use bad examples across companies, for confidentiality reasons. What you want is bad text on a relevant topic, created just for training purposes.

However, I have tried to write bad text and it’s a difficult and time-consuming task. Given all the bad writing in Proposal Land, you might think it would be easy to craft a bad response, but it is not so: Gobbledygook won’t work. The text has to make sense and be largely correct from a technical point-of-view, but also be badly organized, repetitive, and full of believable English errors. You want to approximate the mistakes that proposal newbies make.

So. If you would like to have bad text for training purposes, consider using an LLM to draft and revise it. As part of your analysis, check out this post by Scientist Sees Squirrel, and learn from his well-documented experience and results–albeit in a different field of writing.

The tl;dr: it’s possible to use LLMs spectacularly badly, both unethically and ineffectively, either for writing or for mentoring it.
It’s also possible to use LLMs well – in ways that help writers think about writing, rather than in ways that let them avoid thinking about writing.

Run in Circles?

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He’s OK now, but in late April my husband had a cardiac arrest at home. The reason that sentence doesn’t say “my late husband” is solely because of the astoundingly quick and effective response of one police officer and the team (more police! paramedics! supervisors!) that followed him a few minutes later.

That has led me to think more about emergency response and my limited capacity therefor in the last two months than I did all together in the previous 73 years. Not smart (the lack of earlier thinking, I mean, not what I’m doing now). From personal failings we now move to corporate ones. Organizations, after all, are full of people.

Of course most businesses have on-site first-aid kits (some, tidily stashed on a shelf where you need a ladder to get at it); many/most public buildings these days have AEDs. (Do you know where they are in the places *you* frequent?) Many/most businesses also have some sort of contingency plans. I know because I’ve edited them: lists of actions to be taken in both fast-moving and slow-moving disasters. Floods, power outages, pandemics, attacks by armed brigands. OK, that last one maybe depends on where you live and do business.

But do many/most businesses have contingency plans for what they’ll do when a customer complains? When a hundred do? On the same day? When a production line goes down and orders are going to be late? When a major supplier of essential goods or parts is attacked by armed brigands? When a big electrical storm hits a site where they deliver services to customer personnel?

Seth addresses this question today: And when it breaks? It’s definitely worth the 30 seconds it will take to read. It’s worth the hours it will take to figure out your answer, and the days/weeks/months to put your answer into action.

When you’re not smack dab in the middle of an emergency, spend some of your time getting ready for one. What will you do when it breaks?

What does this have to do with proposals? Just this: Clients ask about your contingency plans, sometimes. You should tell them about your contingency plans, always. And, boy, is that ever easier when you actually have some.