AFP = Alternate/Alternative (both are used) Financing and Procurement
It’s a procurement model that uses the private sector to fund infrastructure (think highways, hospitals, schools, and light rail transit systems) in return for a (usually) lengthy operations contract and staged repayments of the capital invested.
A sibling to public-private partnerships (aka PPP and P3).
How much time does a proposal editor need? It’s a question that is of more than theoretical interest to me at the moment, as I work my way through a flurry of documents against a looming deadline. It’s a question that should matter to everyone charged with setting out a response schedule.
It’s a shame the answer is unknowable or, at least, difficult to calculate. That’s because the answer depends on four things.
Sections come in for “editing” in states ranging from completely unreconciled cut-and-paste nightmares to mature drafts that have been through at least one review cycle: already known to be in the right order, with basically complete and responsive answers.
Time-to-edit has some sort of law-of-squares relationship to length. Fifty pages takes way more time to edit if it’s in one document than if it’s in five. There’s only so much trouble you can get into in ten pages, whereas fifty offers seemingly endless scope for structural and consistency issues – with structural problems being the slowest to repair.
Exactly what are you asking the editor to do? To review for completeness, responsiveness, consistency (within the section, across sections, with external documents like organization charts and lists of plans), clarity, marketing effectiveness, readability, pretty-to-look-at layout, English usage, or typos? Or (ahem) all of the above (pretty please)? And are they just supposed to identify problems, or to take a stab at fixing them?
Who do you have working for you? How fast do they work? How experienced are they at proposals? How well do they know the company? The work? The client?
Here are my rules of thumb:
How much time does a proposal editor need? Hey. You do the math.
A company that staffs client vacancies from its database of qualified workers but that does not take contractual responsibility for deliverables beyond the “bodies” it provides; that is, that does not manage the work performed by these bodies.
To be distinguished from companies that contract to provide services, including the management of staff.
RFP responses can seem complex and intimidating, especially to the uninitiated. Simplify the task by dividing and conquering. After all, there are only four kinds of content in proposals. Herewith, some notes on financial content: what drives the requirement, what it looks like, and where your focus should be.
There are two underlying drivers for financial-content requirements:
Every RFP requires a price to be included for the goods and services as the bidder has offered them in their proposal:
Some RFPs also require bidders to identify the following items:
Even if these additional items aren’t required for proposal submission, they make valuable notes for the proposal manager and the executives (to negotiate a contract) and the operator or project manager (to deliver the Work).
There are two things to consider:
As a general rule, the low price will win the bid. If the company want to propose a solution that exceeds the requirement, the extra should be priced separately as an option.