Carl Dickson

The MustWin Process is an approach for capturing leads that require the submission of a proposal. It makes proposal development more efficient, sets expectations, enables progress and quality to be measured, and increases your chances of winning. It focuses on getting the right information and going through the steps to turn it into a winning proposal. The MustWin Process is for those who want to win and realize that a one-size-fits-all fill-in-the-blanks template is not the best way to go about it. The MustWin Process offers ways to accelerate the process, but not at the expense of doing what it takes to win. It provides guidance and helps you figure out what to say and write, but does it in a way that is completely customized around winning a particular opportunity at a particular customer. It’s the sort of thing a small business can use to outcompete much larger companies — or the sort of thing a big company can use to revolutionize itself. It’s currently in use at companies with only a handful of people as well as at companies with more than 10,000 employees. The MustWin Process starts by getting you ready to win the proposal, before the RFP has even been issued. As soon as the lead is identified, the MustWin Process guides you to gather the right information and position your company to win. During the critical pre-RFP phase of activity, it provides an innovative structured approach called Readiness Reviews that enables you to measure your progress toward being ready to win at RFP release. Once the RFP is released, the MustWin Process provides guidance for planning and developing your proposal. It uses an innovative technique called Content Planning to provide a link between pre-RFP intelligence gathering and post-RFP proposal writing. Another innovation provided by the MustWin process relates to quality assurance. Instead of focusing on poorly defined milestone reviews that produce inconsistent results, the MustWin Process implements a methodology called Proposal Quality Validation that focuses reviews on specific criteria that correlate with what it will take to win. The MustWin Process is innovative in a number of important ways: See also: Introduction It’s available and ready to use off-the-shelf. In addition to providing unprecedented economy, it gives you a way to quickly get everyone on the same page — literally. It’s easy to customize and integrate. You can use parts of the MustWin Process to supplement an existing process or implement the entire thing in an organization that doesn’t already have a capture process. It defines roles functionally. The process adjusts to the number of people available. Individuals can cover more than one function so long as everything gets covered by someone. The MustWin Process ensures that everyone involved knows what is expected of them, with clear descriptions of the functions they’ll be expected to perform. It manages expectations. Every topic or step addresses who is responsible, what they must do, what the goal is, and when it must be done. It enables pre-RFP progress to be measured. It ensures that you arrive at RFP release ready to win by providing specific questions to answer and goals to achieve. Progress toward finding the answers and achieving the goals is measured over a series of structured reviews. The metrics provided by the reviews can be used over time to unlock what is impacting your win rates. When combined with proposal Content Planning, Readiness Reviews also solve the problem of how to make a smooth transition from pre-RFP pursuit to post-RFP proposal writing. Finally, it provides an objective basis for bid/no bid considerations. It implements proportionate scheduling. The scheduling of Readiness Reviews adjusts to the time available. Whether you have a lot of advance notice or very little, the MustWin Process shows you what to do and makes the most of the time available. It provides an efficient workflow. Information collected during the pre-RFP phase flows into post-RFP proposal plans, to ensure the proposal reflects everything you know about the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment. Documentation of the proposal plans actually starts prior to RFP release. Proposal plans are forms-based to lower the level of effort. The MustWin Process also ensures that little or no effort is wasted on unnecessary steps by constantly moving information forward and by storing it in convenient, reusable formats. It makes writing easier while improving its quality. The Content Planning methodology introduced by the MustWin Process provides a way to ensure that the proposal addresses everything it should, provides guidance to proposal writers, provides a vehicle for collaboration between stakeholders, and establishes a baseline for measuring proposal quality. It turns the actual writing into a process of elimination. Writers don’t have to start from a blank page, or waste extra effort on planning deliverables that are destined to be orphaned, so writing is greatly accelerated. Writers also get a rubric that shows them how they will be graded long before their sections are ready for review. It defines quality in a measurable way. The MustWin Process first defines what a quality proposal is, and then aligns what you know about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment around it. It turns win strategies and themes into quality criteria that the proposal can be measured against. It validates that the draft proposal reflects what it will take to win. The MustWin Process double checks everything that is necessary to win, and does it continuously instead of just at certain milestones. The MustWin Process ensures that reviews are effective by identifying what is necessary to win, turning those items into criteria, building plans around them, and then measuring drafts against them. It solves the problem of reviews that are not consistently effective and it makes quality and progress measurable. It also solves the problem of reviews that can’t adapt to different circumstances, by enabling you to adjust the criteria as well as how and when reviews are performed. It is highly scalable. Readiness Reviews scale to the time available. Content Planning is an iterative approach that can be rationally scaled back. Proposal Quality Validation can rationally scale both what gets reviewed and how it gets reviewed. The MustWin Process solves the problem of how to use the same process on five-day quick turnaround task orders and 60-day strategic proposals. It lays a foundation for metrics and analytics that can revolutionize your business. Progress toward RFP release is measured. The quality of the draft proposal is measured. The resulting metrics, when correlated over time against your win rate, can provide true insight into what is helping and hurting your business. The MustWin Process can enable you to know what to do, based on hard data, rather than going on experience and conventional wisdom alone. In short, the MustWin Process tells you how to gather what you will need to know and put it in the right format so that when you sit down to write you know what to say to win. It does it in a way that facilitates collaboration and provides a much more effective approach to ensure quality results. It’s available off-the-shelf, is fully documented, customizable, ready for immediate implementation, scalable, provides real metrics and measurable progress, improved readiness to win, improved content planning, and improved quality validation. Better, faster, and cheaper — what’s not to like? The MustWin Process forms the core of the PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase. It was originally published as a hardcopy binder and shipped via snail mail. But now that it's electronic its grown in both depth and breadth, as well as far more useful. PropLIBRARY Subscribers get the MustWin Process along with our recipe library and much, much more.

People often assume that because the topic of a proposal is similar to an earlier proposal, that earlier proposal can be easily recycled just by “changing a few words.” This is hardly ever true. We call pre-written ready to re-use proposal sections “boilerplate.” Working from boilerplate is supposed to save you time because editing is assumed to be easier than writing. But unfortunately, the level of effort required to transform the focus, goals, win strategies, themes, results, keywords, and points of emphasis into another document can easily exceed what it would have taken to write it the way you need it. See also: Reuse Part of the danger with recycling proposal content is that writers won’t review and rewrite everything they should, and will instead just update names, numbers, and key details. But it’s an even bigger danger that the authors won’t optimize every part of the proposal to reflect what it will take to win the new bid. Winning is more important than finishing quickly. Boilerplate that isn’t both updated and optimized can cost you the bid. So what do you do when your authors are complaining that they have to start from scratch writing something that “must have already been written” before? First, you need to understand the real reasons why people crave samples, templates, and boilerplate: They don’t want to do their proposal assignment If they have to do it, they’d like to finish quickly They don’t know what to say What it really boils down to is a cry for help — “Help me do the proposal faster” and “I’m stuck! Help me figure out what to write.” There are better ways to speed things up and inspire proposal writers. People who are looking for a boilerplate solution are balancing their desire to win against their desire to save time. For many people, the idea that boilerplate will save time is just an excuse. The truth is they don’t know what to say and rationalize that boilerplate will help them figure it out quicker, thus saving time. A lot of people fear writing, don’t know how to get started, and are afraid of getting stuck. But rather than saying they need help figuring out what to write, it’s safer to say that they want boilerplate to speed things up. Faster than a template, and more powerful than a proposal template Instead of trying to maintain a boilerplate library, we think Proposal Cookbooks are a better way to provide inspiration. A Proposal Cookbook contains recipes that make writing easier, but the writer still has to do their own cooking. The recipes in a Proposal Cookbook provide: Questions to answer. A recipe provides a list of questions for the author to write answers to. It is similar to an outline, except that the question format prompts the writer to provide the information that a customer needs better than a heading does, and the list is not sequential. Related questions can be grouped or re-sequenced based on the new RFP. Approaches. Since there is usually more than one way to approach a topic, your recipe should address common circumstances, possible points of emphasis, contingencies, and other considerations for writing the section. For example, you might discuss when it is best to include resumes, use biographical summaries, or use a table to describe staff. Strategies. When writing proposals, the context depends heavily on your win strategies and themes. For example, when you are the incumbent you will write about staffing very differently than when you are not. You should anticipate and recommend strategies for certain circumstances. Writers need to know more than what technical subjects to write about — they need inspiration for how to win in writing. Examples. You can give examples for items that are always the same from proposal to proposal, or for when you are describing a topic that is difficult to visualize. An example can be just a short paragraph instead of a whole section. Sometimes an example is all the writer needs to get started. The idea is to help the author without crossing the line by doing the writing for them or exposing the proposal to the risks that result from recycling proposal content. By providing a Cookbook, you help your writers make sure they don’t overlook relevant topics, improve quality, and speed up the process of figuring out what to write. But most importantly, you keep them focused on creating a proposal that is optimized to win instead of on editing a narrative from one context to another. Instead of templates PropLIBRARY comes with Cookbooks that you can use to inspire your proposal writers and accelerate their efforts.

I've never seen a good WBS for the proposal process. I think the reason is that too much is conditional (sequence, duration, contents): You do the steps in the specified order, most of the time, unless you need to make an exception, which in reality happens all the time. Each step usually takes a certain amount of time and effort, but these vary with every proposal depending on circumstances too numerous to list. Which steps you include also varies on every bid, depending on the type, value, staffing available, and other circumstances too numerous to list. We tried automating our off-the-shelf MustWin Process using one of the most sophisticated proposal workflow platforms on the market and found the software wasn’t up to the task. In the MustWin Process we recommend doing things like: Scheduling pre-RFP reviews proportionately (based on the time from lead identification to anticipated RFP release). Planning with a process that lets you tweak the balance of starting quickly vs. taking the time to plan differently on each pursuit and that lets you implement it in either a centralized or decentralized management model. Using criteria-based quality validation that lets proposal planners arrange any number or type of reviews so long as they cover the criteria that need to be validated. Rendering things like these as a sequential workflow becomes really complicated. But if you don't make it complicated, the process won't reflect or survive reality. That's what you see with just about any proposal process flow chart. It gives people a conceptual framework, but in reality, no one actually can actually follow it. One of the things I learned when I created a workbook for our process was that it helps to skip the idea of flow charting the process, and instead focus on topics. This lets people go to a topic when it's relevant. When you define all the conditions needed to render the workflow, the resulting diagram resembles spaghetti and ends up being too complex to be helpful. You see this happen with processes that end up with 90+ steps and diagrams that few people understand and even fewer follow. At best you might define phases like pre-RFP release and post-RFP release. But when you try to break the phases down you run into trouble. Does proposal planning happen before, during, or after the kickoff meeting (or all of the above)? Does quality validation come after the writing, or in a loop with writing, or in parallel, or what? The truth is that every proposal has variations based on staffing availability, the importance of the pursuit to the company, and other factors. In our original hard copy workbook we got around this by using tabs. We have tabs for things like: Pre-RFP Pursuit Readiness Reviews RFP Release/Kickoff Meeting Proposal Planning Proposal Management Proposal Writing Proposal Quality Validation Proposal Production Readers can switch between proposal planning, management, writing, and quality validation as needed. We put them in the book in the general order in which they happen, but in truth they are not sequential. One of the tasks sitting on my “to do” list is to define some graphics that better illustrate the MustWin Process. I have some ideas, but haven't yet solved how to illustrate it end-to-end. I may just illustrate units and not tie them together sequentially. That seems to reinforce the utility of topics over steps.

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