Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Organization Plans

Describe your organization.

We’ve always worked in an organization of some sort, so you’d think we’d have this one down. But we don’t. Why is it so hard to describe, explain, justify, and otherwise sell our proposed organization to a client?

Sometimes the fault lies with the RFP. Sometimes it asks weird questions. Sometimes it asks sensible questions but in a weird order, like covering every possible organizational topic before asking to see the organization chart. (Hint for RFP writers: Get the picture first. Every time.)

But sometimes the fault lies with us: We don’t really know why we propose to organize the service-delivery team the way we’re, um, proposing to. Well, we know in some weird intuitive way, but we can’t explain it.

So, here’s an exercise to do outside of a proposal response period. Take an organization chart that you proposed to some client sometime, and figure out why you did it that way. Here are some factors to consider in articulating the what and the why.

Work departments/teams

  • Did you put all of one kind of worker together (for specialist training/mentoring, for work-sharing, for resilience in the face of absences, for access to key tools/equipment)?
  • Or did you make multi-functional work groups (for cross-fertilization, for cross-training and eventual cost cutting, for comprehensive multi-disciplinary responses to problems, for higher work satisfaction and sense of ownership)?

Functional groupings – Look at your line of senior managers: Who manages what?

  • Did you put each function under its own manager (for better focus, for specialized leadership, for appropriate span of control)?
  • Or did you group functions that need to work well together (for enhanced collaboration, to avoid dysfunctional silos, to cut cost)?
  • Or did you organize similar work or work with similar success factors into divisions (for example, all administrative work in one gaggle, all operational/field work in another)?

Hierarchy

  • Did you make a vertical organization with lots of approval layers and tight supervision (for quality control, for guaranteed adherence to  some work/performance requirement, for clear accountability, to mirror the client’s organization, to give a new service area the management control it needs by limiting the scope for problems to metastasize)?
  • Or did you make a flat organization (for faster response to client requests and/or to emergencies, for higher work satisfaction, to minimize supervisory costs in an environment where people pretty much already know what has to be done and where a problem in one area won’t disrupt the whole organization)?

Location

  • Did you make one workplace (for better coordination and communication, for sharing of expensive infrastructure and corporate resources, for organizational identity and camaraderie)?
  • Or did you set up a distributed organization (to be adjacent to different client operations for familiarity with the work and for faster response times, to save time or money on some input cost)?

Source of staff

  • Did you go with in-house staff (for consistent performance, for lower cost, for an on-site and familiar service presence)?
  • Or did you plan to hire subcontractors (for occasional specialty services requiring unusual certifications, for access to expensive equipment not needed day-to-day, to complete a high-visibility task quickly, to provide seasonal or surge coverage economically)?
  • Or did you use a hybrid staffing model?

Staffing plan

  • Which functions use full-time staff (for consistent performance, for service reliability)?
  • Which functions use part-time staff (for cost control, to meet predictable surges in workload economically)?
  • Which functions use seasonal staff (to cover big workload swings through the year, to access specialized skills not needed year-round)?

RFP requirements – Not least, and never last . . .

  • Did you align your organization with some specific RFP requirement, whether explicit (like watch-keeping or shift coverage) or implicit (a focus on quality or performance levels or safety)?

You’ve already got the picture. Now you just have to use your words.

 

Term: In-house

Describes personnel within the point-of-reference organization, or services provided by these personnel.

The Second Costs More

The first favor is when you ask a friend or colleague
to do something for you.

The second favor is when you ask them
to do it precisely the way you would do it.

They’re not related. And the second one costs more.
Seth’s Blog

A contract does not define favours: It defines obligations. But Seth’s point holds even in extrapolation: Requiring a (sub)contractor to do work in precisely the way you would do it costs more. A lot more.

If you’re doing it because you need the contractor to fit into your organization and work alongside hordes of people all doing the work precisely your way, without any bumps, well, OK. Maybe. But this sounds more like an employee than a contractor. Just sayin’. An extraordinary employee at that. And an extraordinary organization.

If you’re doing it because you can’t define what deliverables you want, what outcomes you need, then think again. Yes you can.

And it will cost less.

 

Useful vs Useless Redundancy

There’s a section in the greeting card store for “New Baby” cards.
I’m not sure what other kinds of babies are available.
Seth’s Blog

Future/advance planning. Past experience. Collaborate together. Necessary requirement. SIN number (although that’s in a different category).  Even as I deliberately type those to make a point, I feel my right hand getting twitchy, reaching for a long-gone red pen.

It’s a space-time continuum thing. There is no space in proposals for useless redundancies. There is no time in review schedules, either: Don’t evaluators already have enough to read?

Omit needless words.

That’s one of the first and sturdiest rules of editing. And yet.

Communication is hard. In conversation, people might not hear everything we say; in a proposal, they might not read every word we write. There is some balance between succinctness and reliability.

In English speech, we say things like “Those three men” which “marks” the plurality of the men in all three words. In proposal writing, we add headings — to sections and to bullets — that alert the reader to our point. Which we then go on to make. Again.

We add pull-out text boxes to highlight the benefits that we’ve just explained.

And yes, we tighten up sentences and paragraphs to eliminate rampant wordiness, but we also leave just enough wordiness that the reader doesn’t need to puzzle-out our meaning. Doesn’t need to parse every sentence with care.

And there’s one other thing about apparent redundancies. On drives through the countryside in the early spring, my mother always exclaimed over the baby lambs. We kids would all laugh. Echoing Seth, long before Seth, we demanded:

What other kind of lambs are there?

Hahaha. And yet. Of all the smart-alecks in the car, she was the only one who had grown up on a farm.  She was the only one who had watched lambing, and held a lamb, baby or otherwise, in her arms. She was — and I can say it safely now that she’s gone — right. There are lambs and there are baby lambs. Using that language marked *her* as someone who had farm experience. And isn’t that credible communication of experience, that effortless communication of familiarity, a big part what we’re trying to do in our proposals?

Of course it is.

And just to circle back to Seth’s point, although there are no old babies available, there *are* babies and new babies. Newborns, we might call them if we were searching for the standard terminology rather than the standard colloquialism among, you know, new parents and those congratulating them. But we’d do well to be sure that our editors aren’t stripping out the very jargon and expressions that mark us as people who understand the work because we’ve done the work. That we are people who know all about baby lambs.

 

Term: Rebid/Rebidding

The process of bidding on Work for which you hold the existing contract that is due to expire.

Arises frequently in government contracting, where procurement policy does not readily allow ongoing contracting between a government client and the contractor without benefit of periodic recompetition, no matter how well the contractor is performing the Work.