A form provided by the client in the RFP that lists all submission mandatories.
Sometimes intended or required to be completed and submitted with the bid.
Sometimes intended to be used by evaluators during the first stage of evaluation and offered to bidders only as a convenience.
Never to be trusted to be complete (i.e. including all mandatories) until it has been confirmed against the list of submission mandatories identified by the proposal team.
Meeting all mandatory requirements.
It sure sounds simple. Is there a problem?
“Be optimistic, embrace failure, and laugh more.”
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson
No one actually likes losing, but people who work on RFP responses really hate it. Proposal people tend to be competitive, task-oriented, and hard workers, so losing really bites. Given their personalities and the time pressure they’re under, team members can easily go negative:
Being optimistic is key to preventing these dysfunctional responses and to getting the best out of the team.
There just isn’t time for anyone to perfect their own work on a proposal. Success requires using joint reviews before anyone is truly ready to expose their work to others, and improving the solution, the written document, and the costing through successive iterations.
“Fail fast.”
Various attributions
Embracing failure may seem counter-productive, but it’s failure in the sense of getting on with figuring out what will work.
Laughter defuses tension in an environment with altogether too much tension.
Laughter connects people in an environment where they can easily feel isolated.
Laughter reminds us that there is more to life than work, and more to work than misery.
Encouraging laughter fosters teamwork.
RFP responses are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete. RFP responses are projects, sure, but they’re also team efforts. I’ve recently been learning how much design teams are like proposal teams.
This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams: “No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”
A contract amendment that adds to or deletes from the contracted scope of work. Can reflect many things:
RFP responses are schedule-driven projects that require a strict project management discipline. Right? Partly right. In proposal terminology, I’d call that answer incomplete. RFP responses are projects, sure, but they’re also team efforts. I’ve recently been learning how much design teams are like proposal teams.
This post is one of a series on proposal teamwork, inspired by a fabulous article on Medium on design teams: “No Dickheads! A Guide to Building Happy, Healthy, and Creative Teams.”
“Say good morning and good night.”
Rhys Newman and Luke Johnson
Greeting others on the proposal team at the start of the workday reminds everyone that they’re not working on their own. It reminds them that they can both give and receive help:
Saying goodnight reinforces teamwork in the same way and offers two specific end-of-day opportunities:
There is, of course, a story that illustrates the point. Continue reading“How to Foster Teamwork: Rule #1”