Proposal Land

Bidders are highly motivated to do well: to submit, on time, a compliant proposal that will score well and offer the lowest price they can. So why don’t they do better? A major reason is the complexity of bid documents.  Simpler documents will lead to fewer questions during the process, and to better responses at the end of the process, where “better” means closer to the requirement, easier to evaluate, and more competitively priced. Herewith, three specific examples of one practical suggestion for keeping it simple.

This week’s advice can be summed up in two words: Get visual.

Use a Picture

Schedules are best communicated visually. To ensure your schedule is feasible, lay out the dates or durations on a timeline. To ensure it’s clear, name the milestones and periods/stages, and then remove any terminology variants from the document.

Use a Form

When you want data, not lengthy narrative, design a simple form for bidders to populate. Whether it’s details on experience, or equipment/product specifications, a form helps ensure that answers are complete, and simplifies both the bidder’s job in organizing the information, and the evaluator’s job in assessing it.

Use a Spreadsheet for Bidder Questions

Give bidders a spreadsheet to submit questions. That gathers all the necessary information in a standard format, allowing you to easily combine questions from different bidders, and saving bidders the bother of designing a readable format.

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This post is based on an article I wrote for the National Institute of Government Purchasing, Canada West Chapter.

Bidders are highly motivated to do well: to submit, on time, a compliant proposal that will score well and offer the lowest price they can. So why don’t they do better? A major reason is the complexity of bid documents.  Simpler documents will lead to fewer questions during the process, and to better responses at the end of the process, where “better” means closer to the requirement, easier to evaluate, and more competitively priced. Herewith, one practical suggestion for keeping it simple.

Think about the critical-path order of all questions: What do you need to know first?  The organization example given here arises again and again, causing an entirely preventable problem: The order of the questions doesn’t help evaluators understand the answers.

Ask about the Organization First

The gold standard in RFP responses is to say who will do something, where that “who” is a position, not just the bidder’s company. It shows that the bidder has thought through how they’re going to provide the services you need.

So what?  Bid documents often ask about ten other things before they ask about the proposed/promised organization, so that bidders have to decide whether to repeat the organization content at the outset.

So what?  Putting information where it hasn’t been asked for is bad for three reasons:

• It’s out of order: That can annoy evaluators who just want to see what they asked for, where they asked for it.
• It’s repetitive: That can lead to inconsistency when the organization changes, as it surely will during proposal development.
• It eats space: That causes problems with page-limited proposals.

Eliminate these problems by putting the organization question first: in the response and in every applicable section.

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This post is based on an article I wrote for the National Institute of Government Purchasing, Canada West Chapter.

 

Bidders are highly motivated to do well: to submit, on time, a compliant proposal that will score well and offer the lowest price they can. So why don’t they do better? A major reason is the complexity of bid documents.  Simpler documents will lead to fewer questions during the process, and to better responses at the end of the process, where “better” means closer to the requirement, easier to evaluate, and more competitively priced. Herewith, some practical suggestions for keeping it simple.

This second in my series for procurement professionals focuses on remembering “what you want” – and asking for just that, just as specifically as you can.

Ask Just for What You Want

Ask for just what you want to see in the proposal. Don’t use overview (introductory, explanatory, context-setting) statements followed by the detailed list of requirements. Bidders go through those overviews to identify topics, compare them to the detailed list (looking for duplications or contradictions), and then try to figure out how to organize their response so they answer all the points from the overview and from the detailed list, in the order you expected.

Ask Specifically for What You Want

Ask as specifically as possible for the information you want, avoiding general words that set no parameters on the response. For example, don’t ask bidders to “describe their approach to procurement.” Instead, ask something like this:

“Provide this information on your procurement function:

• organization chart
• position roles and responsibilities
• standards (e.g. applicable regulatory or quality regimes, industry protocols)
• process (i.e. steps from identifying the need to acquiring the goods/service)
• controls (e.g. fraud prevention, corporate approval authorities)”

Without that specific direction, every bidder will take their best guess at what should be included and will likely give you more than you want or need.

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This post is based on an article I wrote for the National Institute of Government Purchasing, Canada West Chapter.