Carl Dickson

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.

Should your quality criteria be few and broad or numerous and detailed? Should they specify exactly what to write, or should they verify that things were considered? The depth of your quality criteria depends on a number of factors, including the consistency of your proposals and the level and variety of subject matter expertise required to figure out what to write. Are you trying to identify criteria based on areas of potential issues, or the issues themselves? Is your goal to verify that the proposal writers have considered things or to verify that they have written things in a certain way? Each topic or even individual criterion might be at a different level of depth, depending on your need for quality validation of that item. If every proposal is a unique and highly technical solution to a unique set of RFP requirements, then you may not be able to specify exactly what to write. But you can use quality criteria to verify that everything that should have been considered or at least mentioned is present. On the other hand, if you are offering a commodity, then you may be able to predict exactly what will need to be presented and how to present it, so your instructions may be very specific. Depending on your circumstances, your quality criteria may verify that the proposal writers have: Considered a topic Addressed a topic Addressed a topic sufficiently Addressed a topic in a particular way You can also make your quality criteria conditional or provide multiple options. What will it take to achieve acceptable quality? What will the proposal your company wants to submit look like or contain? If you do not know the answers to these questions, you should not start writing in the hope of somehow discovering it. Do you know what you need to know to be detailed? Do you have the subject matter expertise to create quality criteria based on the details of what you are proposing? Or are you confirming that topics have been addressed? Do you need the proposal to have a plan, or is it enough to have a plan for delivering a plan? The right level of detail in your proposal quality criteria should be based on the level of detail you want to drive into the proposal, but sometimes you may have to word your criteria around what you know and what you don’t. Achieving the right quality balance How many proposal quality criteria become too many? When do you have so many that reviewers start skipping them or glossing over them? This is somewhat dependent on how many reviews and how many reviewers you have available, as well as the length and complexity of your proposals. How you word your quality criteria has a major impact on how the reviewers assess them, and whether they do it consistently when there are multiple people involved. Ideally, quality criteria should be objective. It helps to formulate them as questions, to guide the reviewers to consider the answers. This is especially true when you have to ask difficult to answer questions like "Is this section RFP compliant?" Even if there is no obvious gap in compliance, the answer may depend on a subjective assessment of the level of detail. The standard in these cases should be “What will the customer consider compliant?” But that is also subjective. If you can't make a criterion perfectly objective, then use your criteria to surface the issue. For difficult decisions or assessments, you want to drive discussion that leads to a corporate decision regarding what the right approach for your proposal is.

In order to implement Proposal Quality Validation, you need to plan a set of reviews to validate that your quality criteria have been fulfilled. But how many reviews do you need to achieve this? What you review is more important than how you review it, or even how many reviews you have. You should have enough reviews to cover all of your quality criteria without overloading your reviewers. You can’t have too many reviews, provided the reviews are small, focused, and support rather than impede proposal development. Small frequent reviews can resemble checklists. While it may seem easier to only have a couple of major proposal reviews, they tend to produce train wrecks, and only having one proposal review can be worse than not having any. This is especially true when the reviews cover so much material that reviewers can’t possibly consider it all and when the reviews come too late to make any substantive changes. Start by defining your quality criteria Regardless of the number of reviews you have, you should start by defining your proposal quality criteria. Reviews can’t be consistently effective without defining proposal quality. Do this by creating proposal quality criteria that are based on what you need to validate in order to achieve a proposal based on what it will take to win. Do not define your quality criteria based on how many reviews you think you should have. Once you know what you need to validate, then you can allocate the criteria to a number of reviews. Using your quality criteria to drive your proposal reviews Each time you accomplish a goal, you should have a review to validate whether the goal was indeed accomplished. This is especially important when the output of one activity will be used as the input for the next. If you do not validate the inputs, then the next activity could fail as a result of bad input. In practice, this becomes simply checking your work before doing something else based on it. This is using quality validation to ensure prior work is reliable, with the goal of preventing late detection of problems that require large amounts of rework. To do this, you need quality criteria that define successful activity accomplishment and goal fulfillment. See our examples of allocating quality criteria to milestones. Wrapping your activities and goals with quality criteria to use during fulfillment as well as after makes accomplishing tasks much less overwhelming. It provides the criteria for measuring success to the people who are doing the work. This achieves much better results than surprising people at the review with unexpected expectations. Your quality criteria not only drive how many proposal reviews you should have, but they also drive how many reviewers you need to participate. When and where should you hold your proposal reviews? When and where to hold your proposal reviews is purely a logistical matter. If you need people collocated to validate your quality criteria, then do that. If you can validate a quality criterion by texting it to a particular subject matter expert and don’t need confirmation from others, then do that. When and where you hold your proposal reviews only becomes an issue when it impacts the reliability of your quality validation. In other words, don’t hold your reviews too late. Or in a time or place where people aren’t able to focus on the quality criteria. Whether to hold reviews in a formal meeting in a conference room, or let people do the review while working from home, is up to you. You can also have a mixture of formal and informal reviews. Consider the number of reviewers, scope of the quality criteria, and importance of the milestone when deciding when and where to hold a given review. If you start from a list of the proposal quality criteria you need to validate, you can group them based on when they should be validated, whether they require specialized expertise, whether they should be consensus driven or require a particular approval, etc.

Proposal quality criteria give you the means to measure the quality of your proposal. Before you can create quality criteria for your proposals, you must define proposal quality. Your proposal quality criteria tell you what you must accomplish in order to create a proposal based on what it will take to win. Defining proposal quality and creating quality criteria are critical parts of achieving Proposal Quality Validation. While this is easy to understand, creating your proposal quality criteria is a bit more challenging. Consider: The quality of your proposal and the odds of winning depend on getting this right. How many proposal quality criteria should you have? How detailed should your proposal quality criteria be? What topics should they cover? And how should you word them? The quality of your proposal and the odds of winning depend on getting this right. How should you articulate your proposal quality criteria? The best way to phrase proposal quality criteria is to make them testable questions. This prompts people to consider whether the proposal fulfills the criteria. For example, you might ask if the proposal or section is RFP compliant. But is that testable? Will people consistently recognize RFP compliance? Perhaps it might be better to ask whether it: Fulfills the RFP requirements? Follows the instructions in the RFP? Contains all the important key words from the RFP necessary for the evaluators to find what they are looking for? Is optimized to score highly against the evaluation criteria? You will get far more consistent results asking testable questions than you will by asking open-ended questions or by asking questions with undefined terms like “compliance.” Here are some other ways to formulate your testable questions: Does it include/address/reflect/incorporate ... ? Are the [bid strategies] correct for this pursuit and [clearly presented]? Is what we are offering [the most competitive approach]? You can also use the “Who, what, when, how, where, and why” technique for inspiration to help you conceive of testable questions regarding the quality of the proposal. Also, don’t forget to address how you want things written in addition to what you want written. For example, you might ask: Is the proposal written from the customer’s perspective? Is the positioning against the competition effective? Is the proposed approach clearly differentiated? Does the proposal reflect the insight we have regarding the customer’s preferences? If you are high enough on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to proposals for style to matter, you could ask: Is the proposal written with a single voice? Is the writing clear and simple? Does the presentation style match the customer’s expectations? And finally, here are some ways of wording your quality criteria that are too subjective and will lead to inconsistent results: Does it have a high probability of winning? Is it compelling? Is it a great proposal? Your writers have no way to know how to respond to such subjectivity, will likely be surprised by negative findings during the review, will still probably not know what to do about them, and may even ignore the feedback. It is much better to put the effort into understanding proposal quality well enough to form testable questions so that your writers can get it right on the first draft. That is why we recommend creating your quality criteria as part of performing Proposal Content Planning before the writing even starts. Qualitative assessment vs defect surveillance See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria Are you trying to catch mistakes, or are you trying to win? You should be trying to do both, but how you word your quality criteria will prompt people what to focus on. Quality criteria phrased as testable questions can prompt inspections. Your quality criteria can: Ask whether something was done Check on whether a requirement, specification, or preference was fulfilled Look for particular problems that you’ve seen before Remind reviewers to look for and flag unsubstantiated claims Prompt people when to perform proofreading Quality criteria can also look for the positive and encourage improvement. They can prompt the reviewer to look for the attributes that you think drive quality proposals. Does every key feature cited have a benefit? Does every section make a point about our differentiators and add up to the reasons why the customer should select us? Does every paragraph address something that matters to the customer? It is a good idea to have multiple proposal reviews so that you can target some quality criteria at early stages and others at later stages. Before and after When you create your list of quality criteria using testable questions, and refine it down to an appropriate number of things that are really important, you’ll see that it is not just a tool to use at the back end to check for defects. It’s a writing tool. The writers need the quality criteria to guide their efforts. A list of quality criteria is like a cheat sheet for proposal writing. The quality criteria inform the writers of exactly what they need to accomplish. But you have to create your quality criteria before the writing starts in order to accomplish this. And the quality criteria themselves must be reviewed in order to ensure they are valid. The last thing you want is to build your proposal around flawed quality criteria. You also need to make sure that your reviewers actually follow the quality criteria. But this brings us back to the need to get away from open-ended subjective reviews and enter a world where proposal quality is intentionally and specifically validated. This requires training for your reviewers, since many will be expecting just to show up, read, and render their opinions, just like they have in the past. Involving the reviewers in defining and validating the quality criteria themselves can also help.

You can accelerate your proposal quality validation efforts by identifying the quality criteria you want to apply to all proposals ahead of time. You can even turn them into checklists. If you provide an opportunity to create additional quality criteria that are specific to the pursuit, you can accelerate without watering down your criteria. This requires thinking through your standard quality criteria before you start your proposal. If you start a proposal without already having prepared your checklists, you should follow the custom proposal quality validation approach and use it to jump start your checklist development before you start your next proposal. You not only need to have your checklists prepared, you need them to be vetted and probably approved by key stakeholders. Proposal quality criteria that are ignored are useless. The exercise of defining the quality criteria that your entire organization endorses for its proposals is a very healthy exercise for your organization. To implement checklist-driven Proposal Quality Validation: See also: Proposal quality validation First identify the quality criteria that you want to apply to all of your proposals. These will form your baseline quality criteria. Here is some help for how to articulate your quality criteria. Next identify quality criteria relevant to the proposal sections you anticipate having in your proposals. For example: technical approach and management approach. Take it down to the level of granularity that fits your organization. Within management, do you need standard quality criteria for organization, staffing, project management, or others? Treat these as modular add-ons for your baseline criteria. Next identify quality criteria that are relevant to each line of business, offering, or technical domain that are relevant to what your organization offers. Treat these as more add-ons for your baseline criteria. If you have known or repeat customers, consider whether you can pre-identify criteria based on customer insight and awareness. Treat these as more add-ons for your baseline criteria. Create generic quality criteria that are relevant to every RFP you receive. For example, "Did you follow the instructions?" and "Is the wording optimized according to the evaluation criteria?" These are also add-ons for your baseline criteria. Finally, create a form for identifying quality criteria that are specific to this pursuit. While you might be able to identify some of the subjects that should be considered, the criteria themselves will be unique. This is the final add-on for your baseline criteria. While the more effort you put in this category, the better, it is the icing on the cake. For high-volume proposals, you might not put a lot of effort here and rely solely on your standard quality criteria. When you combine the baseline with the add-ons, you get a set of quality criteria you can quickly assemble. Format each set as a checklist. For a new proposal, you start with the page(s) for the standard quality criteria and add the page(s) for the relevant sections, offering/domain, customer, and standard RFP. Then create a checklist for the pursuit specific criteria and you have all the quality criteria you need to validate the quality of your proposal.

You need enough reviewers to cover your quality criteria. Some reviewers can be specialized. For example, one or more reviewers to focus on whether your proposal is RFP compliant, whether the technical offering is the best your organization can offer, whether you have the right bid strategies, and whether your positioning reflects your company’s strategic plan. They might all be validated by different people. Or combined into one review by a single person with the right background. You can have reviews that consist of one person validating a single quality criterion that is performed remotely while proposal development continues in parallel. Or you can have a formal assessment against a list of quality criteria by a team of reviewers. See also: PQV implementation Start by allocating quality criteria to reviews. Then look at the scope of quality criteria required for each review and determine whether you have one or more reviewers with the knowledge and skills to cover all of your quality criteria. If the scope of the quality criteria is too broad for one person, then split it up among multiple reviewers. Along the way, you’ll also need to decide whether you need second, third, or more opinions on certain quality criteria. For example, in some companies you may need several people to validate bid strategies. In addition to grouping the proposal quality criteria that can be reviewed at the same time, you can also group the quality criteria that can be validated by the same reviewer. This enables you to allocate your criteria to the fewest number of reviewers as possible. Be careful though, you don’t want to overload any single reviewer. Keeping track of who has been assigned which quality criteria can alert you when you need to engage an additional reviewer. It also gives you flexibility when a reviewer is unexpectedly not available, and it can help you assess the impact of engaging additional reviewers as backups or for second opinions. Finally, consider what your organization needs in terms of consensus and approval. It is not enough to validate to your personal satisfaction that all quality criteria have been fulfilled. Others need to accept that the quality of the proposal is valid. You may even have team members from other companies who need to be involved. Which stakeholders need to be on review teams in order to achieve necessary buy-in will vary by company and impacts the number of reviewers you will need to participate, as well as who they should be.

In the name of efficiency, you want to streamline the number of proposal reviews you have. However, doing so exposes you to a conflict with proposal quality. On top of this, the number of reviews is not even what impacts efficiency the most. Having fewer, but larger reviews that can’t possibly consider everything does not increase efficiency and decreases quality. On the other hand, more reviews and more reviewers can increase the logistical burden. The key question is “What is the fewest number of reviews you need to validate the number of quality criteria you have?” See also: Goal: validate that the draft reflects your quality criteria The best way to increase review efficiency is to make the act of reviewing easier. Most people do not consider this, because they wrongly assume that reviewing means reading the entire proposal while considering every possible issue. A quality criteria based review can be checklist simple. If the scope of a review is to validate criteria fulfillment for a particular milestone (such as completion of the Proposal Content Plan) and you have less than a dozen or so criteria to consider, your reviews become a lot more focused, more objective, and results will be more consistently effective. When you have one open-ended draft review that is supposed to cover everything, your review will drag on and people will start to skip things. Lots of quick, easy, highly focused reviews will deliver better quality than one big, inconsistent, and burdensome subjective review. You can still have an open-ended draft review if you want, but it becomes less important and no longer your primary means of achieving proposal quality. In proposal quality validation, the most important reviews are the early ones. For example, it’s critical to validate the proposal outline before you start writing. Your Proposal Content Plan review is often more important than the draft review. Holding large late stage reviews leads to discovering problems that require extensive rework becoming train wrecks. Late stage reviews should be about tweaking wording, with bid strategies, proposal structure, what to offer, how to make best use of the page limitation, etc., already having been validated. If you are rethinking during late stage reviews, you did not adequately perform your earlier reviews and need to reform either your quality criteria, reviewer training, review procedures, or all three. In addition to allocating your quality criteria to milestones, you can also group the quality criteria that can be reviewed at the same time. If you can avoid allocating too many criteria to a single review, you can use this approach to consolidate your reviews and reduce their number. Another consideration is what review method is needed for each of your quality criteria. Some may require a team to review, while others can safely be reviewed by an individual. Sometimes reviews are best conducted in person, while others can be done remotely. These factors can impact the number of reviews you need. Many small quick reviews, that validate as little as a single quality criterion performed as a process of elimination is the best way to ensure that all of your quality criteria get appropriate attention and you end up with a proposal whose quality has been thoroughly validated. Lumping everything into one, or even a couple, of big reviews doesn’t make it any easier, can be more disruptive, and risks reviewers not being able to give everything the necessary attention. If you think about it, every assignment should come with a definition of success. That definition should be expressed as quality criteria. The completion quality of some assignments can be self-assessed. Some will require another set of eyes. Some may require an approval or additional opinions. But a quick check of the completion of every assignment along the way will produce better results than a marathon review at the tail end of the proposal. Build your quality validation in by defining quality criteria for every assignment and then make all those reviews checklist simple. If one company implements Proposal Quality Validation and another sticks with its outdated all-encompassing too-little too-late proposal review, which do you think will win?

Proposal specialists tend to obsess on building a process based on writing and reviewing. Pricing is an after-thought. What happens when you reverse that? What happens when you build the process around what it takes to produce a winning price proposal instead? What does the proposal process look like from the pricing perspective? A failure to integrate pricing puts your win rate at just as much of a risk as a reduction in the quality of the narrative proposal. Maybe even more of a risk. In order to prepare competitive proposal pricing, the pricing experts require input that answers their key questions. When their questions are not answered, you can have a disconnect between what you intend to offer and its competitiveness. When their questions are not answered in a timely manner, this is often not discovered until the very end of the proposal, resulting in rapid, unplanned, and high-risk changes to the proposal that put your win rate in jeopardy. The pricing process is driven by these key questions: See also: Pricing What are the strategies and positioning that will drive the pricing? Is the intended offering price realistic and competitive? Is the pricing model RFP compliant? What is the Basis of Estimate (BOE) for the proposed offering and does the result reflect the strategies and positioning? What materials, costs, or other pricing data must be researched and how will they be validated? Has all of the required pricing data been received? Is it accurate? Is the resulting pricing realistic and competitive? Has the pricing been prepared in a way that is RFP compliant and is it ready for submission? This parallels the process used in the narrative proposal to describe the proposed offering. They correspond with the same things needed for developing the offering and presenting it. What this means is that your pricing and offering are closely related and co-dependent. The pricing proposal must not only be developed in parallel with the narrative proposal, but a failure to integrate pricing along the way puts your win rate at just as much of a risk as a reduction in the quality of the narrative proposal. Maybe even more of a risk. This also means that it is just as effective to drive the structure of the proposal process by the pricing proposal as it is to drive it by proposal writing. For some companies, it might make more sense to start formalizing its proposal process by implementing a pricing process that drives decisions regarding strategy, positioning, offering design, and BOE validation. This can establish a framework with milestones for things like strategy development and planning that can be used to develop the process for the narrative proposal. A chaotic pricing proposal experience is a sign of a broken narrative proposal process. A chaotic pricing proposal experience means that the information needed to prepare a winning price proposal was not delivered in an orderly manner. If you look at the list above, this information does not magically appear, nor is it produced in a single step or handoff. To achieve a quality pricing proposal, you must have an orderly well-planned pursuit that is based on: Customer awareness that provides an information advantage Solutioning that makes the right trade-off decisions A plan for achieving RFP compliance A BOE that fulfills your bid strategies and makes your offering the customer’s best alternative When these things are well coordinated and validated, you get a higher quality pricing proposal and a more competitive proposal overall. While we are used to looking at the proposal process from the perspective of developing the narrative proposal, you can also start from the perspective of the price proposal and back into the process for the narrative. The two go hand in hand. Work that you do on one part of the process should be fully integrated and support success in the other. And yet the two sides are often done in isolation with little integration between the two. Those who care about their win rates and competitiveness should see an opportunity here to gain a competitive advantage by excelling in an area their competitors ignore.