Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Our Work is No Different

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Think of the technical work you’re familiar with: electricians, carpenters, plumbers, HVAC specialists, painters, heavy-equipment operators, pilots, communication engineers, drivers, software coders. Think of the administrative work: accounting, logistics, policy, procurement, scheduling.

Over 30 years I met folks who were proficient in doing, supervising, managing, and costing a wide range of work. Every one of these folks had methods shown to work most of the time. They had schedules and checklists. They had standards, and troubleshooting methods for when they didn’t meet standard, and structured ways to improve. They had training programs for newbies and graduated certification programs for more senior staff. They had documentation of all the above.

Now think of all the ways that work can be bundled into services. Radar O&M. Airport O&M. Property management. Design and construction of buildings, highways, light-rail transit systems, ships, military vehicles. Policy administration for hundreds or thousands of employees. Every bundle of services I ever tried to sell had a layer or five of coordination, scheduling, and communication processes over and above the processes required to make the individual disciplines function well. That’s how the world works, when it does.

Proposals shouldn’t be any different. If you’re still winging it–if every late night is a surprise–then today is the right time to step back and think about your proposal processes. To get some that are better. You can start by searching this site’s posts by any of these categories: managing schedule, standards, proposal teams, reviews, workflow; checklists; training.

Is it a lot of work? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. If you need more encouragement than that to get started, then read Seth’s post from today.

 

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.