Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

The Class of the League

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If there were league tables of culture, Britain would be mid table at best when it comes to philosophy, music, literature, art, physics and chemistry. But it is the Man U or Liverpool of biology and always has been: the circulation of the blood, evolution by natural selection, the structure of DNA, genome sequencing, in-vitro fertilisation, DNA fingerprinting, cloning: the list is extraordinary for a country with 1 per cent of the world’s population. Go Bio-Britain.

– Matt Ridley, Bio-Britain is leading the world in Covid science

OK, British references. “League tables” are rankings of something, from football leagues to universities. But you likely got the point without me ‘splaining. In Matt Ridley’s view, Britain is only OK at philosophy, music, literature, art, physics and chemistry, but it’s extraordinary — the class of the league — at the biological sciences and the technology arising therefrom.

Maybe we personally aren’t extraordinary at anything. Maybe we corporately aren’t either. But we all at least have something we do better than anything else, if not than anyone else.

Find that thing, articulate it, use it to choose business opportunities, make a note of examples of it in your day-to-day operations, write about it in your proposals. In the short term, play to your strengths.

And in the long term? Get better at that thing and maybe one day you *will* be better at that thing than anyone else is. Maybe one day you’ll be extraordinary.

Go You.

 

HBR and Me

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We’re like that. (Here, imagine a forefinger and middle finger held together and held up.)

We’re on the same wavelength. We’re like totally totally in sync/synch.  There’s no daylight between us.

Well, no, but the Harvard Business Review and I do agree on the importance of systems to your productivity, even, if I may say so, to your very survival in Proposal Land. So let’s look at their recommendations for improving productivity at the systems level.

Tier your huddles. In Proposal Land this means having stand-ups with the whole team, operations-concept planning sessions with just the technical experts, and pricing-strategy sessions with the proposal manager, coster(s), and executives.

Make work visible. In Proposal Land this means using flipchart paper on the wall, initially for the schedule, later for the selling themes, and later still for tracking the status of sections.

Define the “bat signal.” In Proposal Land this means giving people guidance about which medium to use for which communication. I can’t say it any better than HBR did (go figure), so it’s worth checking out. I used to hate getting an email invitation to a critical meeting that I only saw hours after said meeting because I had my head down working to some deadline (again, go figure). If it’s time-critical, pick up the phone or swing by my desk, dagnab it.

Align responsibility with authority. OMG yes. Don’t make the production lead get every formatting decision vetted by a senior manager who’s never actually done that work. Don’t hobble the proposal manager with having to get every decision about how the work will be done approved by a team of executives. Will your team make some mistakes? Sure. Will they, even more frequently, just do things differently than you would? Yes. Give them your objectives and constraints, and then let the people charged with a task actually do it.

 

Managing the Project Management Triangle

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Good and quickly seldom meet.
– George Herbert,
quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 16, 2010
and seen in John Robson’s “Wish I’d Said That” feature on 2020 Oct 19

Maybe so, but that’s exactly the challenge in schedule-driven activities like, say, proposals. So in the slow times it’s worth thinking about how to make good and quickly meet more frequently. You can accelerate the creation of good responses if you do these things:

  • Work ahead. I’m not a fan of boilerplate — stock answers that can be used in many proposals — because the questions aren’t stock. But we can still do significant work outside the response period.
  • Start short. Insist that writers start with one-page answers before launching on the 5- or 15-page response. Some teams use storyboards. Whatever. Just start with a short answer and then go on to the next step.
  • Use reviews. Everyone wants to do good all by themselves, but there isn’t time for that. Opening-up our work to review is the shortest shortcut we have to getting there.

 

Habits: Redux

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It’s not an accident that dirt roads end up with deep ruts on them,
that moguls on hills get steeper
and that we find ourselves slipping back into
the very things that exhaust us at work.
Once the pattern starts to be grooved, we repeat it,
which only makes the groove ever deeper.
– Seth Godin, The ruts

Proposals are notorious for being exhausting, even for burning people out. So, why don’t we just do things differently?

Habits are habits because in many ways,
they’re simply easier in the moment.

A new year is as good a time as anyway to revisit our bidding ruts. To smooth off some of those proposal-team moguls. To stop slipping back into the very things that exhaust just because we’re too tired to do anything else. To form some new habits:

  • To limit hours of work for proposal teams and to enforce the limits
  • To set standards for presentation quality that are suitable for a one-off sales proposal, as opposed to a coffee-table photo book
  • To include repair time (aka management reserve) in our schedules
  • To train proposal workers outside the process, and to brief them properly inside it
  • To rotate proposal work among all technical and marketing and communications and administrative staff
  • To gather statistics and stories and kudos every week, rather than after the RFP hits the street

Touchy-feely types tell us to stay in the moment. For appreciating the world’s wonder, I couldn’t agree more. For managing proposals, I couldn’t agree less.