Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Term: Compliance Matrix

A table submitted with the proposal that does one or more of the following:

  • Acknowledges and agrees to all mandatory requirements
  • Identifies where in the proposal to find content showing that the requirement has been met (for example, documentary evidence for a submission mandatory; proposal-text evidence for a technical mandatory)
  • Acknowledges and agrees to all draft contract articles

Is It Required?

That depends:

  • It’s occasionally required by the client in the submission instructions.
  • More often, it’s insisted upon by proposal team members who have seen it done elsewhere and think it must, therefore, be a best practice.
  • It’s never (no, never) required unless it’s explicitly required.

Should You Do One?

Well, it’s never wrong, except when it is extended to apply to all RFP paragraphs, which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose and of the import of the various parts of the RFP. This lack of understanding is not a good thing to expose to the client at the bidding stage.

Be warned, however, that it’s exceedingly time consuming to create one for large, complex proposals.

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Submission mandatory

Compliance

Compliance checklist

Draft contract

Term: Compliance Checklist

A form provided by the client in the RFP that lists all submission mandatories.

What Do You Do with It?

Sometimes intended or required to be completed and submitted with the bid.

Sometimes intended to be used by evaluators during the first stage of evaluation and offered to bidders only as a convenience.

Never to be trusted to be complete (i.e. including all mandatories) until it has been confirmed against the list of submission mandatories identified by the proposal team.

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Handling mandatories

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Handling compliance

How to Foster Teamwork: Rule #2

“Be optimistic, embrace failure, and laugh more.”
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson

Be Optimistic

No one actually likes losing, but people who work on RFP responses really hate it.  Proposal people tend to be competitive, task-oriented, and hard workers, so losing really bites. Given their personalities and the time pressure they’re under, team members can easily go negative:

  • Impatient with delays
  • Accusatory about the deficiencies of others’ contributions
  • Defensive about their own contributions

Being optimistic is key to preventing these dysfunctional responses and to getting the best out of the team.

Embrace Failure

There just isn’t time for anyone to perfect their own work on a proposal.  Success requires using joint reviews before anyone is truly ready to expose their work to others,  and improving the solution, the written document, and the costing through successive iterations.

“Fail fast.”
Various attributions

Embracing failure may seem counter-productive, but it’s failure in the sense of getting on with figuring out what will work.

Laugh More

Laughter defuses tension in an environment with altogether too much tension.

Laughter connects people in an environment where they can easily feel isolated.

Laughter reminds us that there is more to life than work, and more to work than misery.

Encouraging laughter fosters teamwork.

 


 

RFP responses are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete. RFP responses are projects, sure, but they’re also team efforts. I’ve recently been learning how much design teams are like proposal teams.

This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams: “No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”

 

Term: Change Order

A contract amendment that adds to or deletes from the contracted scope of work. Can reflect many things:

  • Inattention in the original Work specification
  • New circumstances
  • Bright new ideas
  • The contractor’s wiliness in bidding what appeared to be a complete solution, but was not