Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Bid Preparedness

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I’ve written elsewhere in some anger about how a wealthy, educated country like Canada wasn’t ready for the oft-predicted global pandemic. Lacking preparedness, our governments floundered around, creating relief programs on the fly and putting economically (and humanly) disastrous measures in place to avoid overwhelming a healthcare system not designed or resourced to ramp-up to handle a surge. Good, eh?

This is not that rant.

I’ve written elsewhere more in sorrow than in anger about how  bidders are never ready to answer specific questions about their experience. We don’t have to predict the odds that we’ll be asked these questions: We know we will be. And yet almost every company I’ve seen flounders around until the last minute, trying to choose project examples, get accurate details, find good photos, collect kudos and stories about accomplishments, and create compelling graphics.

This is not that rant, either.

This rant is about how bidders are never ready to answer general questions about their experience: about how they are unprepared to recount their history clearly, consistently, and compellingly. We don’t have to predict the odds that we’ll want this content: We know we will. Even if the RFP doesn’t ask for it, our executives will want it for sure. And yet almost every company I’ve seen flounders around until the last minute when writers try to make pudding out of nothing and editors try to drive out inconsistencies that breed like cockroaches and that are about as appealing:

  • When were we incorporated?
  • Did we get that accreditation in 1992 or 1993? What does its acronymized title actually stand for? (Do *any* two people in the company understand it the same way?)
  • Did we receive that award in 2006 or 2007? What’s the proper name of the award and the association issuing it?
  • Are annual revenues $151 or $152 million?
  • How many line items do we manage in inventory?
  • How many square feet or metres of property do we manage? Could we get it all in one measurement system? Please?
  • How many suppliers do we have? How many are small- and medium-sized businesses?
  • How many employees do we have? What percentage are members of designated groups?
  • What’s the correct name of our training program? Our quality program? Our maintenance method? Our computer system?

And on and on and on.

Details not your thing? On a higher plane, how can we best show our experience in an easy-to-grasp and yet compelling way? In text? (Spoiler alert – Not likely.) A timeline? Another graphic? Well, graphics of any kind take time: Let’s get that done now. Or started, at least. And checked and re-checked and re-re-checked for accuracy by folks who know the experience/history, and for consistency by folks who *do* see the details.

Here’s a flash. The Spring of 2020 was a bad time to start thinking about pandemic preparedness, and the response period is a bad time to start thinking about proposal preparedness.

I note that no one in government has called me for my help lately. Or ever, really. If you’re in the same spot, maybe you’d like to focus some of your attention on how you can be better prepared for your next proposal.

 

It’s Not Complicated, It’s Just Hard

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It turns out that, if you ask yourself “Can I keep going?”
rather than “Can I make it to the finish?”
you’re far more likely to answer in the affirmative.

As an endurance athlete, I found that this lengthy but excellent article about the Quarantine Backyard Ultra and its lessons for the pandemic really resonated for me.

Hahaha. No. As a long-time resident of Proposal Land, I found that it really resonated for me. Because the strategy you might follow to finish one proposal is not the same as the one you must follow to survive an endless series of them.

Novice runners monitor their distance;
experienced ones monitor their speed.

I’ve written before about managing team workload and about managing our own efforts. It bears repeating, because driving people into burnout, or driving yourself there, is counter-productive in a work-quality sense as well as unacceptable in a human sense. And because folks don’t seem to get it.

Maybe this approach will resonate for a different set of folks, and for workers and managers alike.

There is no finish line.
At the pace you’re setting
can you still keep going?
At the pace your team is setting
can they keep going?

 

Term: Proposal Speak

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The style of language used in a proposal as distinct from that used in plans and other internal documents. Includes use of the future tense, as opposed to the present, to clearly indicate to evaluators the bidder’s intention to provide a product or service in a specified way.

May be used pejoratively to mean fluff as opposed to substance, or even to mean outright lies.

Really?

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Bidders will submit a detailed Transition Plan.

Really? You need that at this stage? How’s about bidders tell you about three transitions they’ve managed? What the work was, what they did, how well it turned out?

Bidders will submit a comprehensive Quality Management Plan.

Really? You need that at this stage? How’s about bidders list their certifications from independent industry organizations explicitly dedicated to assessing quality-management plans and practices?

Bidders will submit a Project Management Plan.

Really? You need that at this stage? How’s about bidders give you an organization chart and explain how it’s going to work?

All human endeavour has a lot of built-in inertia: bureaucratic endeavour, even more. And so RFPs continue to hit the street requiring detailed, long, and largely useless plans.

Let’s go back to first principles:

  • What do you (really) need to know about how the bidder will do the work?
  • What do you (really) need to know about what you’ll get for your money?
  • What do you (really) need to know to distinguish between competing bidders?

Imagine you have only two weeks to make a contracting decision. What can bidders reasonably put together in the first of those weeks that will let you choose wisely in the second one?

Hopelessly oversimplified? Yes. Impossibly impractical? Sure. But it’s still a useful thought-experiment antidote to churning out more-or-less the same questions, time after time.

I mean, really.

 

Divide and Conquer

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How do I edit thee?
Let me count the ways.

I edit thee for obvious responsiveness, aligning the sections with the questions: the same numbering, headings, and order.

I edit thee for organization within each section, keeping like topics together and imposing some sort of defensible order on a stream-of-consciousness input.

I edit thee for clarity, ensuring that the same concept in different sections uses the same words.

I edit thee for macro consistency, ensuring that content in different sections tells the same story.

I edit thee for micro consistency, enforcing arbitrary standards on acronym use, capitalization, spelling, units of measurement, and an entire flock of factoids.

I edit thee for readability:

  • Breaking down long sentences
  • Breaking apart long paragraphs
  • Using simpler words
  • Adding bullets and graphics

I edit thee for style, smoothing the idiosyncracies that different writers and technical/business specialties exhibit.

I edit thee for marketing impact, putting the benefit first: in each section, in each paragraph, in each sentence.

I edit thee for length, finding shorter ways to say almost everything.

I edit thee for typos and grammatical errors, driving out basic mistakes.

I edit thee in one pass, jumping effortlessly between the biggest picture (solution clarity and consistency), the big picture (marketing impact), the slightly smaller picture (style consistency), the tiniest of tiny pictures (standardizing spaces around slashes), and all the pictures in-between.

Or not.

Jumping from one conceptual level to another, from one level of abstraction to another, from one level of detail to another, is work. Hard work. Tiring work. Prone-to-error work.

The longer I do this work, the more I’m inclined to break editing into discrete tasks. First, structure and numbering. Second, readability and length. Third, clarity. Fourth, consistency and style. Fifth, length and graphics.

One person can do it all, or a few editors can tag-team a document, with one cleaning up the obvious messes and the other reading for meaning. Successive passes can deliver a higher-quality product faster than a single pass, and with less wear-and-tear on the editor(s).

Pick one focus at a time (OK, or two – this *is* Proposal Land and some parallel processing is expected). Complete it (or them). And repeat.