Category: Management Tips

Team leadership complements proposal management by harnessing contributions from all team members to do the right thing, both for the task at hand and for the people involved.

Use meetings in the open as the default to build team cohesion and to facilitate team alignment. Meet behind closed doors as the exception, and only when necessary to protect sensitive information, either for competitive position or for personnel confidentiality.

The language we use – including profanity – plays a role in whether our gaggle of colleagues will come together as an effective team.

One lesson from design teams is to design the process to fit the project. On RFP responses, this means tailoring the process to the scale of the response, providing communication and control tools tailored to that process, and setting appropriate standards.

Walls – whether actual or virtual – are places where the big points about an RFP response are posted, in a format big enough and simple enough to be seen and taken in at a glance: the response schedule, the selling themes, and the control sheet that identifies the status of each of 37 sections in the final multi-stage process of preparing the document for submission.