Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Repeating the Question: A Best Practice?

 

Repeating the RFP question in the response – something I never saw done in my early days in this business, a full quarter-century ago – has become more and more a standard practice in RFP responses.  Is it also a best practice?  Let’s take a look.

Why do it?

Why has it become more common?  I’m not sure, but I can see two benefits.

First, during response development, it facilitates reviews, making it easier to see three things about the answer to each question:

  • Whether it’s responsive (that is, actually answering the question)
  • Whether it’s complete (that is, answering every part)
  • Whether it’s in the right order (that is, in the same order as the question)

Eliminating the need to flip back and forth to the RFP itself is a real boon in these speedier times.

Second, it might also help the client’s evaluators:

  • Making it obvious which question you’re answering
  • Making it as easy as possible for the evaluator to see that the answer is responsive and complete, thereby garnering the most marks possible, given its content

Why just “might help”?  Well, evaluators are likely working with an answer key, a scoring sheet, or a checklist of some sort, so they might not need to refer to the actual question.

Why not do it?

Two words: page limits.

In the old days, clients rarely set page limits on sections or overall responses: now, that too is common.

Most proposals can ill afford the space to repeat the question, especially where they’re wordy, and especially since there are other ways to ensure that the evaluators know which question you’re answering.

If you do do it, how should you do it?

Do unambiguously differentiate the question from the response text, using text boxes or different font selections from the main text (colour, style, type), or use both of these visual cues.

Don’t use unnecessarily large graphics like fancy 60-point “Qs.”  The question is not more important than the answer.

Don’t summarize the question.  This effectively destroys the one clear benefit from the practice:

  • A summary can mislead in-house reviewers into thinking an incomplete answer is actually OK
  • A summary can annoy evaluators who realize that the question is not true to their original

If you don’t do it, what should you do instead?

Do use the numbering specified in the response instructions, exactly as given.

Do create a short, meaningful heading/title for each numbered section that helps evaluators confidently identify the question.

Do issue RFP questions to in-house editors and reviewers and brief them on how to use them to assess each answer.

Is it a good idea to keep the questions in until after the final review and them remove them?

Not if you’re working with a page limit.

Editing and formatting to meet a page limit is almost an art form.  Both editors and formatters will do their best work when they know the parameters from the outset.

Pulling all the questions just before going to production will have one of three results:

  • You’ll be bang on the page limit
  • You’ll be over, resulting in panicky, ill-considered cutting
  • You’ll be under, with no time to fill the extra space available

Me, I play the odds, and get a look at how we’re doing with page counts as early as possible.

 

Term: Get-well Amendment

 

A contract amendment that adds scope at an inflated price, to compensate a contractor that seriously underbid some other portion of the Work, intentionally or otherwise.

Never issued to one’s own company (which naturally negotiates extra work only at entirely reasonable/justifiable prices): only issued to competitors that buy a contract.

Tip for Managers of Proposal Managers

 

“If you reward effort you get results.
If you reward results, you don’t get effort.”
– DeBono, 2005

We all celebrate the wins.

One company I worked for kept a big hand bell and someone walked (or ran) through the halls, ringing it, when we heard that we had won the contract.  It was a great moment.

Then we all went back to the trudge-trudge of our work on the current proposal.

I’ve only ever seen one company that really got what DeBono was saying – not that they were perfect managers, but they understood this truth:

If you reward effort, you get results.

The time to express appreciation for the often extraordinary effort that proposal teams put in is at the time, or just after the proposal goes in – not when the contract is announced.  After all, a 1 in 3 hit rate is excellent, so rewarding only the winners ignores the work that 2 out of 3 teams has done.

 

Term: Cost

 

Cost (noun)

What the bidder thinks it will cost to deliver the Work if selected as the contractor.

Cost, cost-in (verb)

To include something in the costs accumulated for the Work; as in “Is the overtime costed in?”

Writing Better about Risk: Tip #5

 ,

Many RFPs require narratives on the bidder’s understanding of risk and approach to risk management.  Often, what bidders provide wouldn’t be out of place in a textbook: plain-vanilla risk management processes that lay out standard identification, assessment, and mitigation steps.  Boring!  Worse, they show no sign of being tailored for this scope of work: Indeed, they show no sign of ever having done this scope of work. 

Now, granted, clients can do better than to ask about “approach.” But even if they do give you this fuzzy question, it’s not that hard to do a better response.  Tips #1 to #4 are about thinking about risk from the client’s point of view.  This tip is about being coherent in your risk response; that is, if you create a conceptual framework, using it in all questions that apply.

The Questions

The RFP asked about risk management: two back-to-back questions in one section, and then again in another section.

Question #1 said, essentially, “How do you categorize risks?”

Question #2 said, essentially, “What risks do you see for this project?”

Question #3 said, essentially, “What risks do you see for this function?”

The Answer

Using text copied/pasted from a corporate plan (because that glue tastes so good, I guess), Answer #1 was a textbook classification.  Not wrong, you understand, but not super targeted.

Using text copied/pasted from another proposal for similar work, Answers #2 and #3 were much better targeted.

Hurray!  Right?  Well, maybe not.

The Problem

Looked at together, the three answers had, essentially, no common ground.  The classification framework introduced in Answer #1 was never used or even referred to again.

So.  What does it mean to have a clever generic risk classification scheme that we don’t, you know, actually use in thinking about risks on actual projects or within specific functions?

Not much, I’d say.