Staff proposal teams for on-time delivery of compliant and high-scoring bids. Use a considered and sustainable effort for superior proposal teamwork and better bids.
One lesson from design teams is to design the process to fit the project. On RFP responses, this means tailoring the process to the scale of the response, providing communication and control tools tailored to that process, and setting appropriate standards.
Walls – whether actual or virtual – are places where the big points about an RFP response are posted, in a format big enough and simple enough to be seen and taken in at a glance: the response schedule, the selling themes, and the control sheet that identifies the status of each of 37 sections in the final multi-stage process of preparing the document for submission.
Under extreme time pressure, hard-charging proposal teams can go negative, become paralysed by fear of failing, and forget to laugh. Flipping all of these is key to fostering effective teamwork.
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 on numerous challenges. Saying goodnight also reinforces teamwork and gives others the courtesy of a chance to ask you that one burning question before you leave.
It’s an old truism of supervision that you can’t do something and supervise it at the same time: The doing pulls time and focus from the supervising. Yet folks keep trying to combine doing and supervising functions on proposals, with dire results.