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.
I’ve written recently on what to do if an RFP asks you to respond to (or “address,” my favourite) every “element” of the SOW. Scare quotes used here to indicate irritation, since neither “address” nor “element” is a defined term in Proposal Land.
I believe that the first line of defence must be to try to get the client to clarify what they really want, but if they DO clarify and it goes the wrong way — with instructions to respond to every SOW line item — what then?
Then this.
A malapropism walks into a bar,
looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing,
muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other,
who takes him for granite.
Like the person I my-own-self heard refer to “the cold face” (vice “the coal face,” meaning “at the point of the (hard) work”), many of us know words and expressions that we’ve only ever heard, never read, and that we can scramble ever so slightly as a result.
Add that to the ever-so-helpful auto-completions from word-processing software and, for all intensive purposes, you can generate malapropisms that spelling check will never find.
Never take a good copy editor for granite, but do stand well back if they start muttering epitaphs.
The sum total of what must be submitted to the client.
Defined by the response instructions.
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.