TArticles tagged with: Brenda Crist

Laying the groundwork for a great proposal kickoff

You only get one shot at a great proposal kickoff meeting, so make it count. Good kickoff meetings put the controls and processes in place to efficiently produce the proposal and motivate the team. By the end of a good kickoff meeting, participants must clearly understand the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of efficiently developing the proposal and be prepared to start work. Do as much groundwork as possible to prepare for a great kickoff meeting before the RFP release. A comprehensive list of activities you can pick from to accelerate your preparedness follows. Kickoff meeting preparation tasks Prepare the kickoff meeting: Agenda Slide template Calendar invitations Physical or virtual meeting space Proposal planning and execution tasks Prepare the proposal: Schedule and milestones Assignment list (with a description of roles and responsibilities) Template to acquire/validate questions about the request for proposal (RFP) Plan to identify, assess, and mitigate … Continue reading Laying the groundwork for a great proposal kickoff →

Bid and proposal department “Boss for a Day”

What would you do if you were hired tomorrow to create a bid and proposal department from scratch? Here’s the scenario. The company sells custom services and plans to dedicate 3% of its gross annual earnings of $100M annually, or $900K, to bids and proposals. If this was a company involved in product sales or less-intense custom proposal efforts, it might reduce the percentage it dedicates to bids and proposals to 1%. In this scenario, the company provides the bid and proposal department with a common platform for operations, including MS Office, MS Teams, MS Project, Adobe Acrobat, Zoom, and system security. The company has no written policies, processes, or tools governing bids and proposals. The company plans to produce approximately 15 custom proposals annually. Those 15 custom proposals average 25-30 pages per bid. The company expects 35% of bids to occur in the 4th quarter. What would you do … Continue reading Bid and proposal department “Boss for a Day” →

Seven tips and tools to quickly improve your writing quality

I confess that I am not the best editor of my own work. I sometimes overlook misspelled words and don’t always use the correct punctuation. However, I implement these seven helpful tips and tools to improve my writing quality: Revisit your work after a “cool down” period to edit and refine it. Conduct a final edit to verify that the document has a compliant format, structure, and length. Use Microsoft (MS) Word’s Editor feature to fix spelling, grammar, and language issues (clarity, conciseness, formality, inclusiveness, and punctuation). Consider adding the Grammarly online writing assistant tool to detect issues and recommend improvements. Use MS Word’s Read Aloud feature to verify that your document sounds good. Use MS Word’s Insights function to verify that the sentences per paragraph and words per sentence are not too long and that you have an acceptable Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level. Use MS Word’s Accessibility Check to … Continue reading Seven tips and tools to quickly improve your writing quality →

Teaming friends, frenemies, and enemies – 12 tips to mitigate harmful effects

Did you know that contracting officers spend up to 20% of their time mitigating disputes between teaming partners? In an informal poll we conducted on LinkedIn last month, 40% of respondents classified their teaming partners as “frenemies” on their last bid. You can foster friends, frenemies, or enemies by the process you implement to initiate and maintain relationships with your teaming partners. So, let’s identify who might be a friend, frenemy, or enemy. Friends Provide insight into customers and competitors Deliver valued solutions and key personnel Provide exceptional past performance Share resources to support bid development Frenemies (friendly rivals) Produce artifacts at their convenience Produce work that is uneven in quality Don’t provide their most qualified personnel Game the process Enemies Don’t disclose adverse information Exhibit “enemy-like” behaviors post-award: Acting unprofessionally Complaining to the customer Sabotaging customer relationships Bringing frivolous lawsuits One of the ways we can identify friends and … Continue reading Teaming friends, frenemies, and enemies – 12 tips to mitigate harmful effects →