Carl Dickson

Within the MustWin Process Architecture we divide the organizational layer into the following areas: Executive, Approaches, and Resources. The organizational layer forms a context that impacts your ability to win bids. But it can’t necessarily be accounted for as inputs to the process. It’s not part of the process flow, but it impacts every step of the process flow. It is roughly analogous to style in writing, only it’s the management style of the environment your process operates in. See also: The MustWin Process Architecture: How does it all fit together? Assessing the impact of the organizational layer on your process Assessing the impact of the input layer on your process Assessing the impact of the performance layer on your process Your win rate depends on adapting your process to this environment. Instead of steps and procedures, this will often take the form of communication and guidance to help stakeholders address these considerations. A simple checklist or table may be all it takes. However, failing to anticipate these considerations will likely mean win rate reducing delays, ad hoc decisions, and unnecessary conflict made against your proposal deadline. Executive: Decisions, oversight, and authority How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Decisions and approvals. Where are decisions required in the process? Who may make which decisions? Who participates? Under what circumstances? Are there any circumstances in which decision making is not communicating, managing, and monitoring expectations? Expectations exist in all directions. What should people expect from their stakeholders? What do the stakeholders expect? How are expectations communicated and managed? What happens when expectations aren’t met? Every step in every process should address expectation management. Strategic planning, positioning, and messaging. How are the organization's strategies articulated and how does this impact the pursuit and proposal processes? Defining quality standards. Is proposal quality defined? What is sufficient regarding quality? How is quality validated? How to assess the quality of completion should be built into every goal and every step of the process. Priority setting. What priorities impact processes and stakeholders? How should competing priorities be resolved? Conflict resolution. Can conflicts in resources, approach, policy, goals, or procedures be anticipated? Culture. What values, both declared and undeclared, impact the process and stakeholders? Is the organization risk averse or risk tolerant? Is quality really the priority people think it is? Is the organization mission focused? How will the organization’s culture impact the process and stakeholders, and how can the process impact the organization’s culture? Approaches: Processes and procedures that cross boundaries, set organizational standards, or are strategic in nature How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Bid/no bid decisions. Which pursuits will be bid, which will be canceled, and why? Insource vs outsource. Does the organization have a preference? How does that impact staffing the pursuit? Centralization vs decentralization. Where are decisions made? Where are resources located? Consistent and planned vs reactive and ad hoc. Does the organization do things carefully, predictably, or chaotically? Are processes defined or made up as people go along? Authoritarian vs collaborative. Are things done by individual assignment, decision, and approval, or are they done by groups and consensus? Structure, hierarchy, escalation, delegation. How the organization is structured is different from how it makes decisions. However, escalations and delegations are ways of mapping decision making to the organizational structure. They define an approach to decision making that is often absent but is incredibly helpful for resolving issues against a deadline. Remote vs collocation. Does the organization have preferences regarding how or when work is performed remotely vs being performed with staff collocated? Resources: Ensuring that the organization has the people, facilities, and equipment needed to function How do these impact the process and stakeholders? Does any existing process account for them? Oversight of logistics. Think of the resources requirements for winning the pursuit as a supply chain. How will the organization identify and supply the resources required? What stakeholders will be involved and what will they be required to do? What will happen as resource requirements change during the pursuit? Sourcing and strategic relationships. Once you know what resources you need, where will you find them? How will you source them? This often depends on strategic relationships, both inside and outside an organization. Budgets and finance. All resources have costs, although they may be accounted for in different ways. Within your organization, how are resource budgets defined and managed? This will impact the procedures you need to follow, not only to launch a pursuit, but also to make changes during a pursuit. Procedures for allocating resources. Once resources are identified and accounted for, they have to be assigned. But nearly all pursuits require support outside of the organization that controls the pursuit. The procedures required to allocate the resources that have been authorized impact your ability to staff and manage the pursuit.

Some companies are built on formal hierarchies, with decisions made by someone in charge. Other companies are consensus driven and work through collaboration. Neither approach is right or wrong. Depending on the circumstances, one can be a better fit. However, picking an approach that does not match the culture of the company is doomed to failure. Rather than deliberate over how to determine which approach will work in a given environment, there is a much simpler approach. If you have to ask, then you don’t have the authority. If you don’t have the authority, you have to manage by other means. If you can’t use the stick, then get good at using carrots. See also: Successful process implementation To the people you have to work with, fighting for control that you don’t have is both uncooperative and unsupportive. Not only does it not add value, but when it distracts you from adding enough value to make your approach easier than the alternative of ignoring it, control dramas can actually make your efforts a net negative. They add to the friction of doing proposals. I have never seen fighting for control work. Ever. Even in authoritative companies. If you win a battle today, you have to start over tomorrow. It creates a constant struggle. Either a person is recognized as the authority or they are not. And you do not become the authority by gaining a title or even simply by the blessing of The Powers That Be. If you are in a culture that is driven by authority, who has what authority will be clear. Or there will be constant struggles. Trying to be the authority when you are not is just annoying. And a little sad. If you can’t force people to do what you think they should, you should try getting them to want to do what you need. How do you do that when nobody wants to work on a proposal? Start by thinking about what they do want. Here are 5 things that proposal contributors often desire: To complete their assignments quickly. Focus on providing inspiration and guidance for how to complete their proposal assignments. Avoid orphaned work (anything that does not go into the delivered proposal). Make file management clear and easy. Focus on goals instead of procedures. Make your process an easier way to achieve their goals than figuring it all out on their own. To not get stuck in a situation where they don’t know what to do. People feel fear when they get assignments they don't know how to fulfill. Make your process self-explanatory. Help them understand what the RFP means. Help them figure out what to offer. Help them figure out what to write. Prevent them from ever getting stuck. To not waste their time and effort. Proposal contributors do not want to reinvent the wheel. This is what they think they are doing when they are asked to start writing from scratch on a topic they think has been addressed in previous proposals. But don’t recycle proposal text. Instead, convert past proposal copy into recipes that will enable writers to go from inventing what to write to applying what has been previously written to what it will take to win this proposal. Proposal contributors also hate to be told to start over. You should provide expectation management and guidance to prevent this. Providing writers with the same quality criteria that reviewers will use is a good way to achieve this. Proposal contributors also hate bidding a loser. They’ll go the extra mile for something they feel they can win. But they’ll burn out quickly on something they think shouldn’t be bid. Either make the bid rationale clear, or take it as input that your bid/no bid process filter needs to be changed. To have control over their own destiny. Get everyone to agree on the goals before moving forward. How those goals are achieved is secondary, so you can afford to be flexible about that. People want to be able to choose the approach they’ll take and juggle their priorities so long as they achieve the goal. Managing priorities becomes an issue when people know what they need to do but they can’t manage their time. Transparency, coordination, and helpful alternatives work better than pressure. Things slip when people haven't bought into the goal and are just paying it lip service because it's easier than complaining. To create a better future. A proposal creates opportunities for future work. The approaches proposed impact that future work environment. Writing the proposal is writing the future. Also, seeing a continuously improving proposal environment helps people accept today’s challenges if they can trust that tomorrow will be better. Guide them to a better future in order to give them a reason to care. Every instance I can remember of people being resistant to working on a proposal involved one or more of these items. If you feel like people need to be forced it’s probably because your process isn’t meeting their needs. So flip that around. How can you change your process to better address these five things? What if you threw your process out and started over making these five things your top priority? What would that process look like? This is what we did when we wrote the MustWin Process. It’s goal driven. It provides options. It anticipates things that lead to wasted effort and seeks to resolve them early. It prevents users from getting stuck by ensuring that the information required to complete each task is delivered to the person performing that task. It manages expectations so people know what they are getting into. It provides new ways to monitor progress. But most importantly of all, it adapts so you can get just the right balance between authority and collaboration for your environment.

In a past life I helped a company create a new proposal department. The company was part of a billion dollar government contractor. They had a history of business units not accepting process guidance from the proposal group. It’s not an uncommon problem. Does it sound familiar? When people choose to opt in, you start the proposal with half of the battle for process acceptance already won. The old proposal group kept saying things like, “If they’d only submit their drafts on time” or “if they’d only listen to us.” What they meant was “If they’d only do what they’re told.” They thought the solution was for someone to force contributors to meet the deadlines they set. They didn’t realize that they were just creating a control drama that they were always going to lose. Their response was to try to fight harder for control. It didn’t work. And while it took years, they ended up losing their jobs over it because they came to be seen as uncooperative instead of being value-added. I was asked to create a replacement for the old, uncooperative proposal group. There was so much negative history that people had lost perspective. I looked at it as an expectation management problem. The business units had the wrong expectations for what it takes to win a proposal, and the proposal group had the wrong expectations for their role as a value-added support function. The first thing I addressed was what the business units could expect from the proposal group. This is different from what the proposal group expects from the business units. As I made notes, the list grew beyond what I could fit on a sheet of paper. It was important to me to keep it to one page since I knew it would be difficult to get their attention. So I turned it into a poster. I could present it during meetings and I posted it in the proposal department. One day we were discussing an important proposal that was coming up and how we should approach it. I decided to give the executive sponsor a choice: We can work together in collaboration, with everybody giving their best efforts and treat the process as a set of recommendations. Or: We can ensure that you know what to expect at every step. You will know what each person is expected to do, including when and how, and who will make every decision. If you select this option you will be committing, both personally and for your staff, to following the process. And we will be committing to meeting the expectations it defines. We will do things by the book. Please examine it before you decide whether to commit to it. Whichever way you decide, we’ll work just as hard to win the proposal. What I learned from studying people's reactions to this approach is that executives desperately want to know what to expect. They’re used to being let down and constantly having to fight fires. When you communicate clear choices like “If you want this, here is how to get it” and then don’t try to force them, they no longer react as if in a confrontation or a power struggle. Taking this approach requires that you organize and document your process differently from the way most people have theirs. Instead of a flow chart of activity or a data flow diagram, the process needs to show expectations and fulfillment. You can’t get away with merely having a way of doing things. You not only must create the book in order to do things by the book, but you must be able to follow your own book. And they must be able to follow it as well. When you commit to fulfilling expectations, you want them documented and you really don’t want to have to walk back your commitment. To better understand process acceptance, see also: How the MustWin process can enable you to achieve process acceptance Introduction to the MustWin Process If you think you need more authority to force people to follow your proposal process, you’re doing something wrong The one-step proposal process? When does too much proposal process hurt your proposals? This experience was very helpful when I wrote the CapturePlanning.com MustWin Process. Every activity that it defines addresses who has the lead responsibility, who plays supporting roles, and what needs to be accomplished. It is goal driven and goal fulfillment can be validated. When you look at it as a whole, it becomes easy to say “If we do it this way, you know what you are going to get.” It is designed so the process itself can start with review and acceptance by the Executive Sponsor of the pursuit. By giving people a chance to opt out you really don’t stand to lose much. If they opt out, it just means doing things the same way you are doing now. Only you have explicitly told them that all they can count on is your best efforts. But when they opt in, then they have committed to following the process formally and you start the proposal with half of the battle for process acceptance already won. And while that doesn’t guarantee they won’t change their minds, it’s the fighting chance you need to be successful. Just make sure that they have a positive experience following your process, so they choose it again the next time. Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it…

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What makes a great proposal process isn’t the steps. It’s not even the functionality. It’s the ability to anticipate problems and maximize the effectiveness of contributors. The questions below won’t tell you what steps you should have. They won’t even tell you what to do. But they will point out when you need to change because you have problems that aren’t being addressed by your process. See also: Steps If a particular individual is required to execute the process, you do not have a process. You have a personalized way of doing things. Do people show up prepared? Do you agree on who is responsible for winning and who is responsible for producing? Do all stakeholders agree on what it will take to win? Are all stakeholders aware of the bid decision rationale? Is everyone on the same page regarding how proposal quality is defined? Do all participants and stakeholders articulate the same priorities? Are bid strategies and the design of your offering completed and validated separately from writing? Do you discover whether what you intend to offer is affordable and competitive before you start writing? Do you ever have to go back and change the writing because of what you discovered when putting together the final pricing? Can you articulate what it will take to win before you start writing? Are people spending more time talking or writing? Why? Do writers know what they need to do to pass the draft review? Do bid strategies change after writing starts? Does what you are offering change after writing starts? Do teaming partners complete assignments on time and with sufficient quality? Do people get stuck? Are review comments based on written quality criteria? Do reviews typically discover the same problems? Do you routinely ignore review comments? Do you have the right balance between authoritarian and collaborative management for this environment? Do all contributors have the information they need? Do all contributors have the skills they need? Are risks identified and mitigated, or ignored? Do problems linger? Is it clear who should make which decisions? When a problem occurs, do you have to figure out who can make any decisions needed? Are behaviors negatively impacted by budgets and accounting? Do you manage your proposals like an investment? Are assignments self-explanatory? Are you filling gaps? Why are there any gaps? Are things snowballing towards the back end? Do you focus on goals or procedures? Can contributors articulate the goal of every step? Is it clear what contributions need to be made and by whom? Do people know how to make their contributions? Is it easy for people to make their contributions? Do your staff resources cover your functional requirements with sufficient depth? Has the amount of change been minimized? Has the amount of effort required to achieve the goals been minimized? Are proposal staff resisting change more than your stakeholders? Are you providing the right options to match the circumstances you face? Are you looking for tools to get people to buy in instead of adapting to achieve buy-in? Are you sacrificing win rate to lower costs or effort? Are you introducing more risk than you are mitigating, especially at the back end? Do you have a planned mechanism for incorporating debrief feedback and lessons learned? How do you know when the proposal is complete? Are you making decisions based on the impact to your win rate? Now, take this list and add any recurring problems that you should look out for and solve. Just be careful. The solution to “people won’t meet their deadlines” might be “do a better job of content planning” or “design the offering before you start writing.” Similarly, problems during draft reviews might be a result of not validating your bid strategies prior to writing. If people won’t participate in planning before writing, you might be making planning too difficult. What’s the least you need in your plan, and can you script it or turn it into a checklist? The MustWin Process Architecture can also help give you a 360-degree view of how everything from culture to resources to management fits together. The model helps you to make sure that you are addressing everything that will contribute to your success and maximize your win rate. It may also help to focus on rolling out small bite-sized changes. Instead of reengineering your entire process at once, try solving specific problems by delivering the information needed to achieve your process goals and helping stakeholders to maximize their effectiveness. The steps will work themselves out. We help companies make process improvements that pay for themselves by increasing your win rate. Get our insights, make sure you haven't overlooked anything, solve problems you thought you had to live with, and win more of what you bid. Sometimes we just provide an outside opinion on what you have, sometimes we help you plan the changes with you doing all the work, and sometimes we play an active role. It all depends on your needs. Click here to get on our calendar so we can discuss your needs.

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Weekly Modules: Weekly module links are live when they are red and bold. You cannot access a module until the link to it is live. Week 1: Click here to access the Week 1 module Week 2: Click here to access the Week 2 module Week 3: Click here to access the Week 3 module Week 4: Click here to access the Week 4 module Week 5: Click here to access the Week 5 module Week 6: Click here to access the Week 6 module Week 7: Click here to access the Week 7 module Week 8: Click here to access the Week 8 module Week 9: Click here to access the Week 9 module Week 10: Click here to access the Week 10 module Week 11: Click here to access the Week 11 module Week 12: Click here to access the Week 12 module Hinz Academy Portal: Click here to access the 2019 Academy 1 Portal Hinz Academy Quiz/Exam Portal: Click here to access the Quiz/Exam Portal Your user id is your Hinz/21-rw email address and your initial password is Welcome1 Please change your password after you enter the Quiz/Exam portal the first time - to change your password, click on your name in the upper right-hand corner and select "change password" General Questions Post your general questions here. Helpful tips are posted here. Billion Dollar Graphics Click here to access the "Billion Dollar Graphics cheat sheet" Proposal Templates Folder on Hinz Academy SharePoint: Click here to access proposal templates like the measles chart template and the past performance template.

Process implementation is only one part of one component of everything that goes into enabling an organization to maximize its win rate. The chart above provides an architecture that can help you put the proposal process into context. This architecture matches the environment proposals operate in better then by grouping things by organizational boundaries like business development, capture, and proposal management. The issues shown in the chart have as much impact on your success as how you conduct business development, capture, and proposal management. This architecture looks at things functionally instead of sequentially or politically. Instead of helping you define departments, it helps you develop an integrated approach to addressing the issues, regardless of how your company structures its org chart or labels its staff. Context matters. Proposals are created in a complex environment. Proposals need management. Proposals need input that comes from outside the proposal function. Proposals need an entire organization as a foundation. But where do you start? How does it all fit together? We group these things into three layers: See also: Pre-RFP pursuit The organizational layer. This layer has an executive component, an approach component, and a resources component. They define the environment you must operate in to manage your proposals. The input layer. The components of this layer include information, strategy, and offering design to categorize the things you need to know before you can start writing your proposal. The performance layer. The components of this layer include proposal management, proposal writing, and quality validation. This is where the proposal is developed. These layers put the issues that impact your win rate into context. They require an organizational response. Many of them simply can’t be resolved by someone operating in the proposal management box. But if you are in the proposal management box, this chart can point you to where you need to interface, and what you need other people to address, so that the proposals that come out of the performance layer have a much better chance of winning.

One of the things that I’ve learned by authoring the MustWin Process and having personally been involved with countless process implementations at companies reengineering their proposal processes is that context matters. Much of what goes into winning proposals occurs outside of the process. See also: Successful Process Implementation Consider how decisions get made and what expectations people have outside of the proposal. How is the proposal impacted by the company’s strategic planning and positioning efforts? Who sets quality standards? Who manages priorities? Is the company centralized or decentralized? Authoritarian or collaborative? How is authority delegated to proposal stakeholders? How much work is performed remotely vs. colocation? How much effort is internal vs. outsourced? What roles do teaming partners play? What should we bid and what should we not bid? The myth that there is only one proposal process or that we all follow the same one is simply not true. Issues like these not only impact how your process gets implemented, they also impact your win rate. If you focus on your proposal process without also focusing on organizational issues like these, you not only can’t maximize your chances of a successful implementation, you can’t maximize your win rate. And if your company depends on its proposals for its growth, your win rate is one of the most important measures in the entire company. In addition to the organizational issues, a successful proposal effort requires input. Quite a lot of it. What will it take to win? What insight do we have about the customer? What should we offer? What cost/value trade-offs will we strike? What differentiates our offering? How should we position against the competitive environment? What risks do we face and how will we mitigate them? People working on the proposal need these answers before they can start writing. These questions need to be asked and answered before the proposal process starts, not after. You can't build a proposal around the answers if you don't have them, and you can't do it by pasting in answers after it's written. Then there’s the proposal performance layer. Process is only one component. What about your management model? Preparations before you start? Assignments and progress tracking? Expectation management? Issue management? Tools, libraries, and resources? Training? Self-assessment tools? Quality validation? Proposal management requires an organization and not just one person with a title. If the organizational layer and information input layer are as important as the performance layer, and if process is only one component of the performance layer, then could you be putting too much emphasis on process? This is a strange thing for a process geek like me to say. However, I’m not advocating ignoring process. I’m advocating giving attention to the organizational and input layers as well so that the proposal process has what it needs to be successful. It’s easy for proposal specialists to retreat into an area they have some control over. But proposal success depends on getting outside the proposal and making sure the organization can deliver the information needed for proposal efforts to succeed. It’s all about win rate. Who at the CxO level is primarily responsible for your company’s win rate? If it’s not at the top of the priority stack for someone at that level, then it’s not a priority for your company. Pawning it off to the VP of Business Development makes it a sales issue and not an organizational priority. If all of your revenue comes from proposals, then win rate is an organizational issue. If you are a lowly proposal specialist with no voice at the CxO level, you may focus on production instead of winning and end up being a low-value asset to the company. Or you can delve into the mathematics of win rate analysis and begin educating The Powers That Be on how their success depends on those numbers and tie your value to the company's revenue and success. If all you do is evangelize process, you won’t get very far. Evangelizing about process is basically telling other people what to do. However, educating people about win rate analysis and how their growth potential depends on winning enables you to have a far more profound impact on the entire company. After that, everything else falls into place. This is so important that I’m building a performance improvement model for integrating the organizational, input, and performance layers. Take all those considerations above. Now draw a picture showing how they are related. That’s what your company needs in order to make sense of it all and maximize your probability of winning. It’s what your company needs to have an integrated approach to the proposal process. And it’s being added to the MustWin Process documentation that PropLIBRARY Subscribers have access to.

You can build quality into every activity that’s part of producing a proposal. But you can’t do it with milestone based reviews. With Proposal Quality Validation the emphasis changes from when to review, to what you review. You can apply quality validation to more than just the document. Try taking a deep look at the risks and issues you face in every activity related to producing the proposal. Don’t just think in terms of checklists. Think in terms of what needs to be done correctly to win. Then think about how to validate every action and outcome to increase your probability of winning. Creating quality criteria to validate these activities formalizes your approach to proposal management. Instead of relying on people to just know what to do and to remember all the details, by creating quality criteria for activities and outcomes, you gain several benefits: Reliability Lower risk Higher probability of winning Lower costs In the same way that giving your proposal quality criteria to your writers helps them achieve success with the first draft, having quality criteria for your pursuit activities and outcomes helps the people engaged in the pursuit be successful. This is much better than finding out later that things weren’t done well and trying to recover before you lose. Start by dividing your activities into activities that produce an outcome or a deliverable. Then consider what must happen for each to be successful. Activity before the RFP is released Think about the issues you face pursuing a lead before the RFP is released. What needs to happen to be ready to win at RFP release? Can you validate that your preparations are putting you in position to win the proposal? Here are some questions that can drive your pre-RFP quality criteria: Do you know what information you need to write the winning proposal? Do you know what constitutes a qualified lead? Under what circumstances should you cancel a pursuit? Are you making sufficient progress to be ready to win at RFP release? Do you have the right pursuit strategies? Do you know what it will take to win the pursuit? What should you offer? What issues could reduce your probability of winning? Are the risks mitigated? You can use criteria like these to validate whether you will be prepared to win at RFP release. Activity during proposal startup Proposal startup is mostly about quickly implementing plans. But doing it quickly does no good if the plans are not valid. Validation during proposal startup is how you make sure you’re not going down the wrong path. Is everything that will be needed to start the proposal ready? Have all issues that arose during the pre-RFP phase been resolved? Do you know what it will take to win? Do you have the plans you need? Do your plans address everything they should? Do your resources match your requirements? Do the plans strike the right balance between thoroughness and speed? What issues could reduce your probability of winning? Are the risks mitigated? Does the intended approach to managing the proposal meet the needs of all stakeholders? You need criteria like these to ensure your plans are validated before you implement them. Otherwise you are following invalid plans and your win rate will suffer. Activity during Proposal Content Planning Creating a Proposal Content Plan is necessary if you want to make creating a proposal based on what it will take to win an intentional act instead of guesswork. Think about what is necessary to achieve what it will take to win in writing: Will the outline meet the customer’s expectations? Does the content plan make it clear where all of the customer’s requirements should be addressed? Does the content plan sufficiently address what it will take to win? If followed, will the content plan produce the desired proposal? Will the content plan meet the needs of both writers and reviewers? Are the quality criteria for the proposal sufficient? Has the time for planning been properly balanced against the time to write the proposal? What issues during proposal writing could impact your probability of winning? Do the instructions in the Proposal Content Plan mitigate those risks? You need quality criteria like these to validate that you have the right Proposal Content Plan. Activity during proposal writing During proposal writing, quality validation can be applied both to tracking progress and to assessing whether the goal of writing a proposal that reflects what it will take to win has been accomplished. This phase is where your plans get executed. Making sure that you follow through on great planning with great execution requires oversight. And oversight can be validated. When you go from planning to writing, think about what you can do to make sure that writing is successful. Is the writing making sufficient progress to meet the deadline? Which Proposal Content Plan instructions have been completed and which remain? Have the writers self-assessed their sections against the proposal quality criteria? Were the instructions in the Proposal Content Plan followed? Does what was written fulfill the proposal quality criteria? You need quality criteria like these to prevent writing from being a big unknown until you see the draft. Activity during final production and submission The big challenge during final proposal production is to complete the proposal by the deadline without introducing any mistakes. A high level of quality surveillance is needed to ensure that no mistakes are introduced. How do you know if you have enough quality surveillance to mitigate your risks during final production? Here are some quality criteria that can be used to assess your efforts: What is required for the proposal to be ready to submit? Have all issues from prior phases been resolved? Is the plan for finalizing the proposal sufficient? How will the proposal be completed without introducing errors? What risks can be anticipated during final production and submission? How will they be mitigated? Quality criteria like these help you assess whether your quality surveillance methods are sufficient. The draft proposal is not the only thing that needs quality validation Quality criteria help you determine whether the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win and get everyone on the same page regarding what a quality proposal is. But what about your plans for how you are going to prepare the proposal? Quality criteria can also be applied to those plans and provide a way for stakeholders to validate that the approaches that will be used to manage the proposal are the right approaches. This is how you avoid getting into the middle of a proposal and finding out that the management methods are not a match for your organization or this pursuit. And avoiding that is well worth the effort. Think of applying Proposal Quality Validation to your proposal management model as an insurance policy. Having insurance that you have the right management model can really pay off for both the company and the people involved in the proposal.

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monthly_2019_02/1043252472_40criticaltruthsaboutproposalqualityv1_pdf.6980538bc69cac0d95ba34ebafdd8afa

You can't follow the steps to create a great proposal, because the steps are different every time. Writing a winning proposal is based on a flow of information that can’t be turned into a sequence. Information gathering is not sequential. And you can never get all the information you’d like to have. Your proposal strategies are often built as much on what you don’t know as on what you do know. Instead of following steps, the things you do to create proposal include: See also: Great proposals Discovery, to get the most information that you can Strategy, for how to position against what you don't know Reaction, to changes the customer made or the information you have Coping, when you’ve got gaps to contend with Recovering, when assignments are delivered late or incorrectly Expectation management, to please many conflicting stakeholders and points of view Perspective shifting, because it’s not about what you want, everything has to be delivered according to the customer’s perspective Problem solving, to react to unpredictable issues everywhere you turn Competing, forcing you to be the best and not merely good enough Most of what happens during a proposal does not happen in sequence. Steps get repeated an uncertain number of times. Routine steps might not be applicable on a given day. New steps frequently have to be invented. The proposal process is not really about the steps, and if your process is based on sequential steps it is likely to fail. This is a major reason why companies don’t follow their own process. If your proposal process is based on steps, you should think about reengineering it into something people can follow. You need goals instead of steps. Your needs and what you have to work with change from proposal to proposal. But what you are trying to accomplish doesn’t. You can build your process around your goals. You can arrange your goals so that accomplishing the first goal sets up what you need to begin work on the next goal. You can do things in whatever sequence makes sense in order to achieve your goals. For example, you don’t need a compliance matrix to win a proposal. You do need an outline that reflects the customer’s expectations and that addresses RFP requirements where the customer expects to find them addressed. A compliance matrix is usually what you need to accomplish this. Except when it isn’t. And the very specific way you create a compliance matrix may get left behind when you have an RFP that has an unusual structure. But the goal remains the same. Whatever you do must result in an outline that reflects the customer’s expectations and shows you where the customer expects to see their requirements addressed. Having the right goal helps you decide what you should do when you have to deviate from your precious steps. It’s how you know when your steps are applicable and when you need to be innovative. The right goal tells you when you are going down the right path. How do you know when you have the right goals? You should add to or change the way you’ve articulated your goals if: You find yourself in a circumstance none of your goals addressed A problem disrupts your ability to achieve a goal A previous goal was followed, but didn’t deliver what is needed for the current goal Participants couldn’t figure out how to achieve the goal Careful wording of your goals can imply what needs to be done and even imply how to know when you’ve done something correctly. A good way to test your proposal process goals is to ask which you can delete or combine, without reducing the quality of the proposal. You want your list of goals to be as short as possible. Likewise, you want to minimize the number of goals that have sub-goals.

Proposals really aren’t about management. Managers operate defined processes with resources and tools to achieve a defined outcome. Proposals are about adapting against a deadline and figuring things out. Proposals require leaders. If you hand me a document and ask me to format it according the RFP specifications and give me sufficient resources and time, I can manage that. But if you hand me an RFP with structural and interpretation problems and tell me to figure out how to create something that will beat all competitors using resources that are not trained and only partially available with no customer insight, no one can manage that. It requires leadership. It requires reinventing how you do things in order to fill the gaps and solve the problems you face. One big reason why companies don’t usually have a documented proposal process that they follow, is that no one in the company has figured out how to document a process that survives the real world. You probably don’t actually follow most of what you’ve been taught about proposal management for the same reason. As much as they may try, proposal managers do not usually start from having set procedures and overseeing their implementation. They start by looking for gaps, asking questions, and assessing risks so they figure out what procedures are applicable: See also: Proposal management Can you figure out how to interpret the RFP's instructions? You can’t create the outline the customer expects if you can’t figure out how to cross-reference the things they’ve said in the RFP. Most RFPs make this somewhere between difficult and impossible. Can you figure out the customer’s approach to making a selection? You can’t help them see why your proposal is their best alternative if you don’t understand how they’ll make that assessment. Can you figure out the customer’s preferences? You need this to interpret the RFP. You need this to know what to offer. You need this to know how to present what you are offering. You can’t write from the customer’s perspective if you don’t know what that is. What kind of proposal manager do you need to be? Collaborative or authoritarian? Process driven or adaptive? Administrative or innovative? Manager or leader? Teacher or overseer? Producer or strategic visionary? Producer or winner? Different companies need different things from their proposal managers. Where are your resource gaps? You never have enough resources or the right kinds. But which problems are solvable? What should you do about those gaps? This applies to staffing, facilities, equipment, budget, and other resources. What are your stakeholders' expectations? Are there any disconnects between what you think needs to be done and what your stakeholders expect? Do you want to implement a collaborative review process? Or written quality criteria? Plan before you write? Will your stakeholders go along with that? Do they have needs that you need to incorporate in your plans? How do decisions get made? There are hundreds of decisions and trade-offs made on a typical proposal. Who will be involved in those decisions and how do you get them made quickly? How will deadlines be enforced? This is a simple question to ask. But the answers are so very complicated. Can you replace underperforming staff working on the proposal? Can you balance competing priorities for them? How are you going to track, mitigate, monitor, and respond to risks during the proposal? Will you do it formally? Informally? Make it up as you go along? Are you going to get involved in the writing? This corresponds with whether you will have or take responsibility for winning. Are you pushing paper or setting the standards for quality? Can you manage the proposal and take a writing assignment? Sometimes the proposal function is organized so that there is someone, typically a capture manager, focused on winning. And a review process that determines quality. And sometimes a company just says “we need you to manage the proposal for us.” Being a proposal manager is not a role until it’s defined. It’s probably several roles. But they can vary. It’s one more thing to figure out. Now. Add those up and create an outline, schedule, and list of assignments that survives for more than a few days. You might have 24 hours to figure this all out. Then people will start changing their minds. Or the customer will change the RFP. Or you’ll learn something new that changes strategies or approaches. Or people will underperform. Can you anticipate these things? Or do you just have to react when they occur? When we think of improving our win rates, we usually think in terms of improving our procedures, information, and techniques. Another thing you can do to improve your win rate is to make sure that problems are solvable. Huge amounts of time and money are wasted on proposals by not addressing problems quickly or effectively. Sooner or later your proposal manager is going to hit a brick wall and not have permission, resources, or the knowledge to solve a problem. Those tend to be the problems that are the most important to solve.

Many proposal problems have more to do with the people involved than the document. Creating a document is easy. Creating a document against a deadline with a bunch of other people all with their own ideas about creating a document is hard. See also: Proposal Process Improvement How do you get everyone to agree on: Who does what? What their expectations of each other are? What the goals are? How to maximize win probability and ROI? How to do things during proposal development? What to do about the risks and trade-offs? How decisions should be made? How to tell if things are done well? What if you applied Proposal Quality Validation to answering these questions? In Proposal Quality Validation, the first thing we review is our plan for reviewing the proposal. Maybe before we start creating our proposal we should hold a review to validate our approach for creating it. Instead of getting everyone together, typically at the kickoff meeting, to tell them what the process is and what they will be tasked to do, maybe you should get people together and decide what the goals are, what the expectations are, and how decisions will be made. Who makes which decisions and by what criteria should they be made? Don’t leave that up in the air. Put specific examples on the table. This needs to be done before you start or at the very beginning of your proposal effort. Some decisions will be made by a person. Some will require multiple stakeholders. Some will require consensus. It doesn’t make much sense to start working on the proposal and then fight about how decisions should be made. Decisions, decisions A typical proposal has hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions that need to be made. Here are some examples: Who decides whether to bet the farm on an interpretation of the RFP? Who decides what the review plan should be? Who decides whether the quality criteria are good enough? Who decides who will work on the proposal? Who decides when to replace someone who’s not working out? Who decides that the offering needs to be changed? Who decides whether what is written is RFP compliant? Who decides what to do about missed deadlines? Who decides how to work that troublesome theme statement? You can’t assume that the corporate hierarchy will automatically sort out these issues if they aren’t explicitly addressed. Indecision is one of the win rate killing issues that proposal teams face when trying to meet their deadlines. The most challenging problems during proposal development tend to be personal. They revolve around who will do things and who will decide what needs to get done. If you want quick decisions that lead to things getting done, you need clarity regarding who makes which decisions and how. The rest is just follow-through. How applying Proposal Quality Validation to the review process helps To achieve clarity, you need to put something in front of the stakeholders, not just to get their buy-in, but to intentionally surface the issues, disagreements, and potential problems with how the proposal will be created. To solve the problem of creating a proposal by working through other people, you need to start by reviewing how you intend to work through other people. And just like with Proposal Quality Validation, the place to start isn’t with your own opinion about how to best accomplish this. The place to start is by defining your quality criteria. What criteria define quality for an approach to working through other people on a proposal? Instead of forming opinions and debating them ad nauseam, ask yourself what criteria can be used to assess whether a process is effective and appropriate. Discuss, argue, come together, and agree on the criteria before you move on to the techniques you think will fulfill those criteria. Otherwise your review is nothing but a subjective opinion-fest, including your own opinions, and the proposal process is based on organizational influence and power instead of reason. When you determine the quality criteria for what makes an effective proposal management process, people will understand not only what must be done, but why things must be done that way. Just remember, this is a review. That means that the reviewers determine what needs to be fixed or changed. One of the reasons this solves problems is that instead of asking for their buy-in, you get it without asking. You surface their concerns so you can resolve them. With their concerns resolved, the only thing left to do is create a great proposal, with everyone aware of how that will be accomplished.

Typically, the proposal process involves creating a plan for what to write, and then writing it. But what sits in between your Proposal Content Plan and the draft proposal? See also: The MustWin Process The MustWin Performance Support Tool Proposal Content Planning Proposal Quality Validation PropLIBRARY subscription information The term “proposal prototyping” was introduced to us by Carrie Ratcliff. After we showed her what the MustWin Performance Support Tool does and started discussing the things we’re adding to it, she said it was “proposal prototyping.” At the time it wasn’t our goal to create a “proposal prototyping” tool. We weren’t even sure there was a need for it. But Carrie turned out to be right, because proposal writing isn’t just one step. It makes sense because, in reality, you don’t just go from the plan to the finished draft any more than you go from specifications to software that’s ready to ship in one step. A prototype is what sits in between. Proposal prototyping enables you to pull together what you have, identify what you don’t, and describe what you are going to do about it so that stakeholders can envision the proposal before it’s created. For proposals this means going beyond adding instructions to your content plan. It means bringing in examples, reuse content, relevant data, and even links to information sources. It means creating something that is part document mock-up and part instructions for writers. The instructions tell you want to do with all the ingredients. But you can lay everything out and see how it’s connected. You can see what the proposal will be. This is what a prototype does for you. It lets you see the product you are trying to build, before you actually manufacture it. Proposal prototyping can lower your risks by enabling stakeholders to see what the proposal will be. Proposal prototypes can be built by moving forward from your Proposal Content Plan in a series of steps intended to test the waters. Doing this in an online tool like we are building makes it so much easier, because everything is linked together and referenceable. But you can implement the idea without special software. Proposal prototyping can also be a part of your Proposal Quality Validation plan. You can use the prototype to get an early validation of what you intend to do in the proposal. You can think of proposal prototyping as a way to experiment before committing to an approach on your proposal. You can test concepts, formats, positioning, strategies, wording, and more. You can use a proposal prototype to validate the approach you plan to take to creating the proposal before committing to the time and effort of completing a draft. Creating a proposal prototype is not required by the MustWin Process, but it is an option you can use to enhance your Proposal Content Plans and integrate with your Proposal Quality Validation plans. We’re building the capability into the MustWin Performance Support Tool and can’t wait to see how people put it to work. 

In certain service sectors, capabilities and corporate experience are talked about as if they are the same thing. While they are related, they are not the same. And they should not be written about in your proposals as if they are the same. A company can have experience in an area, but not have any capability in it. How’s that? Staffing. Resources. Infrastructure. A company may not have the other things necessary for experience to be a capability. Experience is evidence of a capability, but not the capability itself. And it may not be enough evidence. It’s easy to overlook this when some RFPs fixate on experience as the primary means to evaluate capability. But understanding the subtle distinctions enables you to write a more credible proposal. What makes your capabilities credible? In addition to experience, it might be also having: Available staff with the right expertise The resources required to perform The infrastructure, equipment, or locations needed Established and specialized policies, processes, methodologies, quality approaches, risk identification and mitigation techniques, escalation procedures, training, etc. Likewise, you may have all these things, but if you don’t have experience, do you have a credible capability? It is possible to establish a capability with no experience. It is possible to establish a capability with nothing more than experience. Sometimes you don’t need much more to establish a capability than a mere claim to it. But credibility is another thing. And credibility depends on the customer. What does the customer think a credible capability requires? Does it say in the RFP? If it doesn’t, then what do you want to claim and how do you position that claim against your competitors? If the RFP doesn’t define what a credible capability is, you have an opportunity to teach the customer and ghost your competitors. But first ask yourself if capabilities matter at all to the customer. In indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) bids, the customer may be interested in capabilities to meet undetermined future needs. But in other bids, it’s not your capabilities that matter, it’s your ability to credibly deliver the specifications provided in the RFP. Only. Companies like to brag about their capabilities, even when the customer didn’t ask for them and even when a formal evaluation might not consider them at all. So let the RFP be your guide. What does the customer want you to talk about, what can you add to make that credible, and how do you position your response against other potential competitors? After all, this isn’t a brochure, it’s a proposal.

Should you review your proposal by reading it like the customer? Other items you might have missed that answer key questions: How do you define proposal quality? How many proposal reviews should you have? How many reviewers do you need? How do you create quality criteria? The answer depends on what you are trying to validate. It can be a great idea to allocate some reviewers to emulate the customer’s evaluation process. But it’s not the only kind of review you need. You have other quality criteria that need to be validated. So you will also have some reviewers whose job it is to focus on those criteria, and not to read the proposal like the customer will. As an example, you may wish to validate that what you intend to offer is the best tradeoff of performance and price your company can deliver. The customer may want it all. But you need to validate that the proposal team hasn’t overlooked any ways to increase performance while lowering the price. Emulating the customer won’t give you that validation. When should editing and proofreading be performed? See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria Reviews without defined quality criteria can degrade into editing and proofreading. Editing and proofreading are good things, but you don’t need (or probably want) a senior review team to do editing and proofreading. If they are important, get a specialist to do it. It can be tremendously difficult to wait until the proposal is complete and try to fit in editing before the deadline. Sometimes it’s better to take a little risk and do some editing before the proposal is complete. Or do it in iterations or pieces. But producing a draft, stopping the proposal, and having senior executives do editing and proofreading is probably not the best approach under any circumstances. What about people who want to “see” the proposal before it gets submitted? “Seeing” the proposal should be considered a privilege that must be earned. Reviewing a proposal is a process and not a single step. There is no formal quality methodology in existence that relies on a “hero” showing up at the last minute wanting to change things. If the input is of value and you care about your win rate, you’ll have the most impact by providing that input at the beginning, so the proposal team can build the proposal around it. If your responsibility, authority, or interest is high enough to command attention, you can maximize your impact by playing a role in validating plans and defining the quality criteria. You should get to “see” the developing proposal several times, watch it mature, and confirm it’s on the right track. You shouldn’t even need to see the final proposal because you should already know what’s in it. This is when you’ve earned the privilege of seeing the final proposal. What about the final quality assurance checks? Final quality assurance is about attention to detail. It is not about rank or prior participation in the proposal. If you run your production staff into the ground with last minute changes, you should put equal effort into bringing someone fresh in for final quality assurance. Last minute changes often introduce last minute defects. Proposals can lose because of a missing page or other minor oversight. Assign your most painstakingly thorough reviewer to final quality assurance, and not just whoever is available or left standing. Make sure they have adequate time and a complete checklist of delivery requirements to work with. Isn’t creating quality criteria for a proposal a lot of work? Isn’t rewriting a proposal until you stumble across what it will take to win a lot of work? Not to mention a lot of risk? What if you never find it? Creating proposal quality criteria forces you to develop an understand of what it will take to win before you start writing. How can that not be worth it? How do you know if you’re implementing Proposal Quality Validation correctly? If you get to the draft and can’t articulate your definition of proposal quality, something is wrong. If you perform your reviews and there are things your proposal quality criteria didn’t cover, you need to improve your quality criteria on the next proposal. If your proposal reviews are returning substantial changes, then either the writers are not getting or following the proposal quality criteria before they start, or the quality criteria were inadequate. If you lose a proposal in a preventable way, you need to improve your quality criteria to address the issue going forward. If you get to the review and people aren’t on the same page regarding what the quality criteria should be, you need to improve how you define your proposal quality criteria and possibly include additional stakeholders. Proposal quality criteria become a tool to ensure future improvement are made in a verifiable way.

Are your proposal reviews leaderless? Just because people show up, are enthusiastic, and are willing to work hard that doesn’t mean they are well led. Usually the proposal review function is coordinated by the proposal manager. But if the proposal manager is responsible for creating the proposal and administering the process, does it make sense to add quality validation to that list? How important is quality validation to your win rate? Is it enough to merit some dedicated attention? Consider who does each of the following: See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria Defines proposal quality? Sets the standards? Writes the quality criteria? Decides what procedures to follow? Decides what the format for review deliverables should be? Recruits reviewers? Sets the schedule? Coordinates logistics? Trains reviewers? Tasks reviewers? Prepares briefings? Generates reports about review findings? Decides what should be done about the review outcomes? Is accountable for ensuring the quality criteria are validated? Should all of this pass on to the proposal manager by default? It’s only quality validation. What could go wrong? This is complicated by having review team participants that outrank the proposal manager. When this is the case, it’s often a challenge just to get reviewers to show up. Some proposal managers struggle with getting review team participants to show up having already read the RFP. Training executives to stop reading and rendering opinions, and to validate specific quality criteria can be nearly impossible. If transforming proposal quality is a necessary part of improving your win rate, then consider making implementing proposal quality validation the responsibility of a single individual who is not already herding cats to create the proposal. Assigning a leader for the review function enables someone to force the issue on answering the questions above. The answers are less important than having someone who can give attention to each and ensure that there are answers. Proposal quality is too important to be left unsaid. Good enough is not a competitive strategy. You can assign review team leader pursuit by pursuit, or you can have one person who specializes in proposal quality validation. The advantage to having one person do it is that your quality criteria become better over time. Your processes and procedures will improve too. But getting the entire organization on the same page regarding what proposal quality is and what quality criteria should apply to each proposal is key to continuously improving your win rate. You can view the position as profitable if the improvement to your win rate that results from the improvement in proposal quality pays for the position. And it could easily pay for itself many times over.

Reviewers do not show up already knowing what to do. They don’t know the procedures are to be followed. They don’t know the RFP. They may not even know the proper way to read an RFP. They also may not know how your organization defines proposal quality. They may or may not know the customer. They may not even know how to effectively review a proposal. All of their experience may have come from doing purely subjective proposal reviews instead of performing quality validation. They need training in procedures, methodologies, standards, a background orientation to the pursuit, and the composition of the RFP --- all before they play an effective role in assessing proposal quality. But they all don’t necessarily need the same training. Reviewers need to know how to validate what they have been assigned. You don’t want to overload your reviews by asking them to validate everything in one sitting. Consider some of the things you may need validated: See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria The proposal outline The Proposal Content Plan RFP compliance Win strategies Evaluation score Your offering Terms and conditions Presentation Decisions And more… Will you get the validation you require by asking your reviewers to consider all of them? How many of them? If you split quality validation into multiple reviews, then the reviewers need to focus on the scope of their portion of the review. They need to validate what is assigned to them for validation. Reviewers can still make comments regarding concerns and potential improvements, but that should come after the quality criteria have been validated. People are counting on them for validation so that they know which quality criteria have been fulfilled, and which require additional attention. What someone needs to know to validate compliance is very different from validating win strategies. Or the evaluation score. Or any of the others. You need to train your reviewers to validate the criteria that will be in their area of focus. In proposal quality validation, reviewers have a specific mission. They are not on an open-ended hunting expedition. Their role in the process is to ensure that specific criteria have been fulfilled, and not simply advise. Reviewers need training because the odds are some will show up with other expectations. Having the reviewers participate at the beginning in defining the quality criteria is an excellent form of training that also helps achieve buy-in when it is time to validate quality criteria fulfillment. Your reviewers must be capable of performing the kind of validation required. For example: To validate that the proposal is capable of achieving the maximum score, the review must understand the customer's evaluation procedures and preferences. To validate RFP compliance, the review may need technical subject matter expertise and understand how to interpret the customer’s requirements. To validate that the offering is the best you are capable of providing, the review may need to understand the technical subject matter, the price to win, and the customer’s preferences regarding the solution. You will often find people to contribute to proposal quality validation reviews who know some of what is needed, but not all. You might use a combination of staff to fill gaps. But all of them will need some training to understand how to apply what they know to achieving your quality validation goals. To have a well-trained review team you need: Training in your review methodology To have defined your procedures ahead of the review, so you can explain them Training in how to read the RFP ahead of the review An orientation briefing to provide background on the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment An introduction to the quality criteria they are responsible for validating and any additional training they need to be able to perform that validation It helps to start with reviewers who have the right background for the scope of quality criteria they will be validating. But it takes more than just the right background to be an effective proposal quality validation reviewer.

It’s good to use quality criteria at the back end to review your proposals. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense to only use quality criteria after the proposal is written. Or to create your quality criteria after the proposal has been written. It’s much better to put the effort into creating your quality criteria at the very beginning so that proposal contributors receive the quality criteria when they receive their writing assignments. This enables them to create a first draft that meets the quality expectations. This shifts the proposal effort from trying to stumble across what it will take to win, to consciously figuring it out so you can design your whole proposal around it. Doing this transforms your proposals. It turns proposal reviews at the back end of the proposal into minor quality surveillance reviews that are really just double-checking for overlooked defects. It makes the review of your quality criteria at the beginning of the proposal, before the writing starts, of primary importance. It shifts the proposal effort from trying to stumble across what it will take to win, to consciously figuring it out so you can design your whole proposal around it. Defining your quality criteria in advance and giving it to your writers isn’t just transformative — it’s also a competitive advantage. While other companies struggle to figure out what their proposals should be when they grow up, your proposals will arrive already reflecting what it will take to win, with time left in the schedule for polish. This makes it worth getting everyone on the same page at the beginning. See also: Assignments You can accelerate things if you start from a base of standard, reusable proposal quality criteria. It will also help if you build creating your quality criteria into your Proposal Content Planning efforts. Proposal Content Planning provides instructions to proposal writers regarding what to write and how to write it. In fact, an easy approach to Proposal Quality Validation is to simply check and make sure those instructions were followed. When you add your proposal quality criteria to the content plan, the writers also get guidance that tells them how to know when their sections have been written correctly. This combination of what to write and how to know if it’s written correctly is so important, it’s a wonder that all proposals aren’t prepared that way. Instead, companies often leave proposal writers to figure it all out themselves and then judge them after the draft has been completed. This is so obviously inefficient and uncompetitive that it’s a wonder any proposals are still prepared that way. The entire proposal effort is about winning in a competitive environment. Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation are not ends in themselves. They are simply about organizing effort to win, instead of merely completing a document. You should put the least amount of effort into them that you can without losing. If you honestly believe you’ll achieve a proposal that can beat all competitors by not giving any quality criteria to your proposal writers, then skip it. Of course, your competitors have probably done the math and realize that it’s a comparatively small investment of effort with a potentially huge return. And when you do it on proposal after proposal, that return just piles up.

We've been at this since 2001 and have published over 867 articles and 532 proposal recipes. But the articles we wrote in 2018 include some of the most useful and insightful that we've ever published. That is, if you look past the titles. The titles don't do the practical value of the content the justice it deserves. That's something I'm going to have to work on in 2019. In 2018, we had over 210,000 visitors. That's a lot of people interested in winning proposals. Thank you for all that attention. Feel free to spread the love and use the social media buttons to share your favorites. Best free articles of 2018 How to write an Executive Summary for a proposal from the customer’s perspective 29 techniques for dealing with uncooperative proposal contributors Do this one thing and win all your proposals Why the customer does not care about the story you are telling in your proposal Proposal writing for people who are not writers Winning government contracts like you’re trying to get good at it Everything I needed to know about proposal writing I learned from writing the introduction paragraph How to explain to your customer why you should win the proposal Succeeding with a high volume of proposals Why proposal professionals are better than proposal heroes Best premium articles of 2018 In addition to the articles above, we've prepared a list of the best additions to our premium content library for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. While we publish free articles that explain the theory and foundations supporting our recommendations, our paying subscribers get far more detail, including all the checklists, templates, forms, and process guidance needed to immediately implement our recommendations. Here are the best premium content items we published in 2018: Proposal risks, issues, and quality validation Focusing on self-assessment for proposal quality instead of reviews How detailed should your proposal quality criteria be? Conducting proposal reviews based on quality criteria What are proposal quality criteria and how do you create them? How to turn Proposal Quality Validation into a checklist and forms driven process How many proposal reviewers do you need? How many proposal reviews should you have? Management models for Proposal Content Planning implementation Quality criteria for assessing whether an RFP compliance matrix has been completed correctly 2019 will bring a lot more goodies We've started working on what we think of as Version 2 of the MustWin Process as part of the premium content for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. The biggest changes are that The MustWin Process is becoming explicitly goal-based and all tasks are measured by their desired outcomes. It not only covers what to do, but how you know when you've done things correctly. The MustWin Process will provide multiple options that support achieving the goals you need in order to win. It provides examples of what you can do to achieve your goals instead of mandating that you do things a particular way. This will help capture and proposal managers apply the process to their particular environments and solve the problems they face. It also makes it easier to execute the process. The new approach to providing options is especially useful for expanding support for pre-RFP pursuit. Before the only option provided was Readiness Reviews. The new version starts with the goal of arriving at RFP release prepared to win with an information advantage, and uses Readiness Reviews as one way to achieve this. Other options will address getting ready to win from the lead qualification, capture, and proposal input perspectives. Your needs will determine the best way to achieve the goal in your organization. Proposal Content Planning and quality criteria development are being explained in much more detail while simultaneously being made much more flexible. A new layer of risk management and issue tracking is being added and integrated with Proposal Content Planning and Proposal Quality Validation. Miscellaneous changes include some reformatting and reorganization to make the navigation easier. And a ton of miscellaneous improvements are also being made along the way, based on the new material we've published since the MustWin Process was first released in 2010. The concepts are already there in the articles we've published. We're just integrating them, streamlining the user interface, filling some gaps, and making sure the explanations are clear and practical. But what we're really doing is turning all that content into something even more useful during proposal development. We're also continuing to enhance the online proposal tool we've built for PropLIBRARY Subscribers. In 2018 we released the first version of the MustWin Performance Support Tool. We think of it as comparable to Windows v1.0. In 2019 we have a bunch of updates planned. It will not only expand to cover the pre-RFP phase of pursuit, but will also gain functionality for cross-referencing basically everything and evolve into what one tester described as a "proposal prototyping" tool. We're also expanding customization and content saving that will provide you with several new options for proposal re-use. What we're finding is that the platform lets you function as if your process is more mature than it really is. The MustWin Process is built in, but it's more like you just don't have to think about process so much. It points the way to what you need to do and shows you how to do it. You end up with better information to work with and better use of that information, leading to a much better quality proposal that's easier to produce. It still doesn't do the proposal for you. But if your priority is winning, it has some serious advantages over paper-based processes.

Hinz Consulting has a partnership with CapturePlanning.com, LLC, the company behind PropLIBRARY. Hinz Consulting is tailoring the MustWin Process and other PropLIBRARY content to meet the needs of our consultants and customers. This page provides information from Hinz Consulting and links to the content that Hinz recommends and has tailored. Key Resources for Hinz Consulting Useful links for consultants who work for Hinz Consulting Useful links for customers of Hinz Consulting Link to the Hinz Academy: Proposal Developer Immersive Boot Camp Coursework Portal The version of the MustWin Process that Hinz Consulting has tailored for use in our customer engagements

All of the risks, issues, and problems you consider during the early stages of proposal planning should be reflected in your proposal quality criteria. Your goal is to prompt reviewers to consider the risks and issues in addition to the draft so they can validate their resolution. You can use Proposal Quality Validation to achieve an integrated approach to proposal risk and issue management. Tracking problems by writing them down on paper or on a whiteboard can only take you so far. Imagine having a help desk ticketing system for your issues. Each issue gets assigned a priority, is given a mitigation approach, and assigned to someone responsible. If it is not responded to in time, it is escalated to a higher level. Why would you want to put all that effort into it? Because when you lose, the odds are extremely high that it was because of a risk or issue that you knew about but did not sufficiently mitigate. All that investment in the proposal could be wasted because you didn’t validate that the risk or issue was resolved. The amount of effort you put into tracking your risks and issues and validating their resolution should be proportionate to the amount of impact they could have. Otherwise, you are just gambling on whether you are in denial about the risk or not. You may not need an actual ticket tracking system for your proposal risks and issues, but you might want to emulate the concepts by: See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria Identifying your proposal, offering, competitive, and performance risks. This is essentially a list, but should reflect risk severity, document mitigations, and be assigned to a responsible party. Monitoring your risks so you know when they transition from potential risks to actual issues. Assigning issues for resolution. Tracking issues through resolution to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. Escalating issues that are not resolved on schedule. Validating that the mitigations and resolutions are sufficient. Functionally, there is very little difference between: A proposal assignment A Proposal Content Plan instruction An issue that has been assigned for resolution What does Proposal Quality Validation have to do with risks and issue tracking? While Proposal Quality Validation is a way to assess the quality of the proposal, it also has broader potential, because it provides a means to validate the fulfillment of your quality criteria. If your proposal quality criteria address risk and issue resolution, then Proposal Quality Validation can become part of how you ensure the risks and issues will not jeopardize your proposal. Doing this requires you to declare your risks and issues. Not only do you need to document them (how isn’t terribly important), but you need to validate that these are all of your risks and issues. Even if you have daily “stand up” meetings, have you really validated that you have identified all of the risks and issues you need to be concerned about? Once you are satisfied that you have identified them, how do you validate their resolution? What do you do about unresolved risks and issues? Do you monitor them? Do you validate your monitoring to ensure nothing can slip through the cracks? Streamlining things and avoiding denial In the same way that Proposal Quality Validation can be streamlined into simple checklists, its application to risk and issue tracking can also be made checklist simple. The challenge isn’t tracking. Paper and whiteboards work pretty well for that. The challenge is how to avoid people being in denial about the risks. In my experience, this is the real number one reason why proposals lose (even though everyone claims it’s price). Companies lose proposals because of risks they knew about and thought they had overcome, when they really hadn’t. Companies lose because they were in denial. The only cure for that is to explicitly surface and identify the ways things could go wrong and to intentionally validate your mitigations and resolutions. If denial is the number one reason for losing, then eliminating denial could be the number one way to improve your win rate.

The higher the quality of the draft, the less important your proposal reviews become. The disruption they can cause also decreases. This makes investing in getting the first draft right worth the effort. They need some way to compare what they have written to what is required. If you haven’t defined quality for them, they can only guess at it. In addition to defining proposal quality, you need quality criteria that can be used to measure whether the definition has been fulfilled. Quality criteria are a critical part of proposal quality validation, but they can also be used as a self-assessment tool before you even get to the review stage. Self-assessment is especially important in organizations that lack resources. If the only people who have the right experience and subject matter expertise are working on the proposal, who do you get to perform quality validation? If you develop your quality criteria, then subject matter experts and writers can assess their own work. See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria The problem with people reviewing their own work is that they overlook things — sometimes on purpose. With self-assessed quality validation the goal is to keep honest people honest. You provide quality criteria so they don’t overlook anything. But unless you have someone else perform quality validation, it is possible for them to ignore the criteria. There is a trade-off here between reliability and convenience. Your circumstances, such as whether you can trust your own staff, will determine the best way to make that trade-off decision. Also, it can be really hard to break organizations of the idea that quality comes from having someone read the proposal. If you have self-assessment and then someone reads the proposal for “quality assurance,” it’s very easy for that to degrade into subjective reviews that don’t actually deliver quality. They may deliver some improvement, but then again, they may cause more disruption than improvement. Simply reading the proposal and rendering opinions, no matter how experienced the staff offering those opinions, does not validate that quality has been fulfilled. And yet, there always seems to be at least one stakeholder who wants to ignore the quality criteria and simply read the proposal. Performing quality criteria-based proposal self-assessment makes it easier to implement a more traditional quality control/quality assurance approach. The primary review is the self-assessment. But you also have secondary reviews, even if they are just of a sample, to catch when your primary self-assessment quality control is failing. There are a few challenges you have to overcome to implement proposal quality self-assessment: You must create and validate your quality criteria before the writing starts. This is easier if you standardize a portion of your quality criteria. You must successfully shift from treating back-end reviews as the primary review, to treating them as a secondary review of lesser importance. You must train or retrain everybody regarding how proposal reviews should be performed. You must address accountability. Do you require people to actually complete and submit the checklists? How do you know that the self-assessments occurred? The best part about building your proposal process around self-assessment is that it minimizes the need for back-end reviews. But that’s only true if people are diligent about performing their self-assessments. You have to be able to trust your writers. But trust runs both ways. Your writers have to be able to trust your reviewers as well.