Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Ask Before Helping

 

The rule

On a proposal team (OK, maybe on any team), don’t jump in to help without first checking on a few things:

  • Whether help is, you know, wanted
  • What kind of help would be, you know, welcome
  • How to provide said help so that you aren’t, you know, causing trouble

The rule applies to everyone, but it applies more the more senior you are, or the more removed you’ve been from the main work stream of the proposal.

The story

The sales guy responsible for the client receiving this proposal was understandably eager to help.  As I started to assemble the package for the in-house printing and copying centre, I kept finding him standing behind me, smiling.

That, I could live with, although it was a bit unnerving.  Where it started to go south was when he started trying to help.  First he reorganized my piles of documents, lining everything up in nice rows with no gaps.

“No,” I said, “those gaps are how I know that I still need something from Production.”

He stopped moving stuff around, but he wasn’t happy.

Then, when we had everything, I started to pile documents together to take them down to the folks who would copy them for us.  He jumped in again, happily stacking documents in a way that they hated downstairs, because it cost them another step to realign the piles for input to their humongous copier.

“No,” I said, “they need them stacked like this.”  And showed him.

This time, he pouted.  “If you don’t want any help,” he huffed, and moved off.

I stopped for a minute and looked at him, wondering whether it was worth my bother.

“I do want help,” I said, “but we’re always asking the copying department for help with a last-minute job – that’s the nature of our business – so we work hard to make it as easy for them as we can.  To keep them as happy as we can.”

He came back to the table and watched me closely as I assembled packages of files in a way that would cause the least irritation for those folks who were so necessary to our on-time delivery of “his” proposal.

And then he started doing it the same way.

Hurray.

Term: General and Administrative (G&A)

 

A markup added to a bidder’s calculated cost of products and services to cover costs not solely attributable to the production of said products and services but nonetheless attributable to them (for example, a percentage of the cost of corporate services, like accounting or marketing, that supports all projects from a central department).

Also referred to as “overhead.”

Acronymized as G&A; pronounced “gee and eh.”

Asking Clearer Questions

 

Why unclear questions matter

Bidders submitting unclear questions about RFPs to clients risk getting back nonsense answers or not getting what they actually wanted.  But as a simple story illustrates, asking clear questions is hard.

The example

“How much do you want to golf when you’re here?”

On the extension, I thought, “Uh oh, there’s a problem.”  What might it be?  Let me count the ways it might be a problem:

  • It will be expensive for our host to rent clubs.
  • It will be hard for our host to book tee times.
  • It will be rude to leave behind the non-golfers.

In short, I heard this question as this: How badly do you want to golf when you’re here?

The person who responded, however, heard a different question — to wit: How often do you want to golf when you’re here? — and answered accordingly.

Who heard aright?  Not me.

How to do better – Tactic #1

Dramatically improve the odds that the client will hear the question aright by giving some context for the question that explains the point of confusion or concern:

Don’t say this: Please clarify requirement A.

Instead, say this:  We see requirement A and requirement H as mutually contradictory, because of such-and-so. Therefore, we ask that you either clarify these requirements to remove the potential confusion between them, or eliminate one of them.

How to do better – Tactic #2

Review your question for words with more than one meaning. Consider the situation when the SOW states that the Contractor must perform a given task every week.  If you want the client to reduce task frequency, then . . .

Don’t say this:  Would you consider dropping requirement X?

Instead, say this:  Executing this task weekly will be prohibitively expensive.  In our experience, executing this task monthly is sufficient for safety (or whatever purpose).  We therefore request that requirement X be changed to reduce the task frequency to once/month.

 

Term: Fairness Monitor

 

An independent observer of the client’s evaluation process; used in some Canadian government contracting. Responsible for identifying any infractions of the evaluation methodology specified in the RFP.

Usually under contract to Public Services and Procurement Canada (previously PWGSC).

Advice to Procurement Professionals: Be clear

 

It’s a simple question: Do you want bidders to respond to every line item of your statement of work and/or draft contract in their technical proposals?

Yes, Please

If you do, then say so somewhere in the Instructions to Bidders, maybe like this:

Bidders shall respond to every SOW and/or draft contract line item somewhere in their technical proposal. We recommend cross-referencing these line items against the response instructions (and submitting said cross-reference with the Table of Contents) so that topics are addressed where they make sense, so that nothing is missed, and so that evaluators can quickly look up responses to specific SOW and draft contract line items.

You might even give them a cross-reference table to be completed with the appropriate proposal references, just so that everyone does the same thing.

Good God, No!

If you don’t want to see responses at this level of granularity – if, instead, you want to see high-level management or operational plans and examples of relevant experience that demonstrate bidders’ ability to do similar work – then say so, maybe like this:

Bidders shall provide the responses specified in the Instructions to Bidders.  For greater clarity, bidders shall NOT respond to every SOW and draft contract line item.

Whether it’s Yes or No, Be Precise

Don’t give hand-waving instructions like this:

Bidders shall follow RFP numbering exactly in their responses and responses shall be complete.

For bidders, the RFP is the whole thing: the actual RFP and all its attachments, including the SOW and draft contract.  So some folks on the proposal team are always sure that this sort of vague instruction is code for “Address every line item of the whole RFP somewhere in your proposal.”  If what you mean is that the response should be numbered in accordance with the RFP’s Instructions to Bidders (a perfectly reasonable requirement but one that should actually go without saying), then say just that:

Bidders shall number their responses in accordance with the numbering in the Instructions to Bidders.

 

Don’t say this either:

Show how your solution addresses SOW requirements.

For bidders, the obvious and safest response to such a requirement is to address every SOW line item in painstaking (and painful) detail.  If what you mean is that the response should show how some specific objective or deliverable is satisfied, then specify a meaningful objective or deliverable for every section of the response.