11 Ways to mitigate final proposal document review risks

At the 2011 APMP International Conference, Lohfeld Consulting Group’s Managing Director Brenda Crist presented an informative session on mitigating proposal risks. Here are Brenda’s identified Final Proposal Document Review Risks and recommended Mitigation Strategies:

1. No final document review. The company misses one of the most effective and inexpensive mechanisms for improving the proposal. Schedule a final document review as soon as possible.
2. Document review is held too late in the proposal life cycle. Hold the final document review approximately two-thirds through the proposal life cycle.
3. Reviewers are unprepared. Work with the reviewers in advance to verify they understand their roles, responsibilities, and time commitment. Help the reviewers by holding training or producing a brief training document. Eliminate any reviewer who from the review team who is unprepared or unable to provide an objective review.
4. Review is unorganized or does not produce feedback that benefits writers. Hold one review team member responsible for ensuring a concise review of the document is delivered to the review team. Assign review members to support the leader with adequate coverage for each proposal section. Assign a compliance checker and gadfly to review the entire document. Ask the review team to put the main recommendations in writing and have individual authors record their comments on review sheets or using automated tools. Use an automated tool to collect review comments.
5. It takes too long to aggregate the comments of a large review team. Use an automated collaboration tool that enables multiple authors to add comments to one document. If a tool is unavailable, acquire sufficient staff to aggregate the comments.
6. Conflicting comments. The company must assign one person to make the final decision about conflicting comments.
7. Final document is not compliant with customer requirements. Immediately fix compliance problems – make this the company’s first priority.
8. Teaming agreements are not complete. Consider dropping the teaming partner or get the teaming agreement signed immediately.
9. Key personnel are not identified. Consider using pulling qualified in-house personnel to fill the open positions or not bidding.
10. Technical solution is inconsistent or does not meet technical requirements. Identify the solution gaps and immediately fix them.
11. Final document is failed by the review team. Determine if you have sufficient time and resources to write a technically acceptable proposal, if so, schedule a second final document review date.