Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Red Team: Reason for Being

 

What’s the primary point of Red Team?

Is it to improve the proposal with the superior insight that comes from the elevated status and greater wisdom of seniors, organization-wise?

Is it to harass the proposal team by repeatedly pointing out the same obvious flaw in the document?

Is it to force the proposal team to finish their sections to the stage that they can be reviewed?

I’ll take Door #3, Alex.

In 30 years in this business, I have heard maybe 10 ideas from Red Team that I couldn’t have come up with on my own, given the time to breathe. Ten ideas: risk-management approaches, presentation enhancements, document organization improvements, creative presentation tricks, out-of-the-box ways of looking at questions. Ten.

But if I hadn’t had to get my sections ready for review, I wouldn’t have forced myself to conclusion on a hundred or a thousand times that many items. I wouldn’t have got around to thinking about the document from an outsider’s point of view. I wouldn’t have finished, likely.

Is it really only 10 new ideas from all those Red Teams? Could it be even fewer? Maybe. Could it be a few more? Sure.  Dunno and don’t care, really. Nothing hinges on the exact number: the order-of-magnitude is right. The point is this: Red Teams add the bulk of their value simply by existing as a hurdle for the proposal team. Any truly bright ideas they come up with are a bonus.

That’s good for proposal teams to remember. It’s even better for Red Team to remember it.

 

After Red

 , , 2

We’ll catch that after Red.

As in, after the dreaded and infamous Red Team review, about which the less said the better.

As we charge hard to make a deadline, even for review, it’s tempting to defer changes and corrections to what seems like an expansive period of ample time for everything “after Red.”

As Seth points out here, fixing stuff late in the day is the hardest, most expensive time to do it. As I point out here, this also applies in Proposal Land, especially to necessary standardization.

Got typos? Fix ’em after Red.

Got solution and terminological and graphical inconsistencies? Fix ’em soonest. Better yet, put the planning and coordination effort in at the beginning to prevent them.

 

Term: Request for Expression of Interest

 ,

A procurement tool used to identify probable level of competition in a planned procurement, by requesting non-binding expressions of interest on the opportunity as defined.

Sometimes called Request for Letter of Interest.

If Expression and Letter of Interest are meaningfully different, the distinction escapes me.

The Last Minute

 , 2

Date certain

That was the title on Seth’s blog today. Even nose deep (and sinking) as I am in my last last proposal — or maybe exactly because of that — the title catches my eye. Is he talking about what I think he’s talking about?

This is very different from “someday.”
Choose any date you like, as far in the future as you like.
But a date, circled on the calendar.

Yup, it sure ’nuff looks like it. A hard, drop-dead, date-certain deadline.

By that date, what will you have implemented?
What will be in place?
Where will you be, what will you be doing?

Well, in Proposal Land, by that pesky date we will have implemented a proposal.

A small miracle (*Can* miracles be small?) of creativity, teamwork, sticktoitiveness, and plain willingness to work too hard will be in place.

And we’ll be at the finish line, doing exhausted, giddy, relieved, too tired to be proud, really, and justalittlesaditwasn’tasgoodonpaperasitwasinourheads (pretty sure that should be a word) (and pretty sure it is, in German).

Date certain.
Way more powerful than someday.

Well, he’s right, comme d’habitude. And it’s true: assigning a date to an activity is *way* more powerful than not. That’s why no customer ever released an RFP that said this: “I tell you what. You know what we want. You know what you have done and what you can do. Put together a little something on how those fit together in your minds, send it over, and we’ll take a look.”

If it weren’t for the last minute,
nothing would ever get done.
– Another citizen of Proposal Land

It continues to amaze me what proposal teams can get done, given those dagnabbed deadlines. So feel free to sing along with Seth, and grab a little piece of that magic for yourself in another application. Give yourself the gift of a last minute.

 

And if you’d like to read Seth on deadlines, check this out: How not to miss a deadline.

And this interesting companion piece on how to handle it you do: How to miss a deadline.

The applications to Proposal Land are obvious.