How to apply the proposal review process to the proposal process itself

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.

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.