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 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.
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