In This Chapter

The creation of a winning proposal requires the coming together of the right resources—top management (TM) support, qualified, motivated team members, electronic tools, and physical facilities. In Chapter 6, we talked about the people you need to have on your proposal team to cover the various functions. And in Chapter 12, you learned about all the documents you need to develop, collect, or store. So where are all these people going to sit, and what equipment and systems do you need to create and store these documents? This chapter describes the resources—electronic and physical—you need to carry out a proposal effort efficiently and effectively.

We begin with a discussion of location, including amount of office space set aside for the proposal team’s use, configuration, and special amenities of the space and end with the security measures necessary to protect your proprietary data.

Communities of professionals working together virtually from some combination of home-based offices, corporate headquarters or field offices, or hoteling situations has become so commonplace in many enterprises that it’s become almost the exception to have all employees in one place. Industry experts agree, however, that the best circumstance for creating winning proposals for government contracts is to have all proposal team members in the same physical location for the duration of the proposal effort. Further, the consensus view is that the team members handling critical functions (this varies somewhat with each proposal) should be able to spend the equivalent of full-time on the proposal, and therefore need a place to work out of full-time.

The first challenge is to get the right people, for the amount of time, required to complete the task. Not every team member needs to be present full-time during the duration. For example, the writers of the technical sections should be able to come and go as needed for the proposal because they often have other jobs. The proposal manager—who does need to be there all the time—is typically confronted with team members who have conflicting priorities between the business development efforts (that is, the proposal creation that will bring business into the company’s future) and other responsibilities (execution of another program, the company’s current business). In fact, because responsibility gravitates toward demonstrated competence, the team members who are valuable to the proposal team are also valuable to existing programs.

There is very often a conflict between your company’s short-term goals and your long-term goals. Do you assign your best people to existing projects, where their efforts produce immediate revenues and profits, or do you assign them to proposal efforts? Every company has an “A Team”, and the members on the A Team are typically managing or supporting the important programs you already have in hand. But how do you best achieve your growth goals, if not by using the A Team to get new business?

If the conflict is serious, possibly affecting both the ongoing programs and the proposal effort, then the only way to resolve the conflicting priorities is to call on top management to resolve the conflict. TM cannot solve problems it does not know about. Therefore, having TM close to the proposal effort makes it easier to make the correct call and resolve the conflict between these individuals’ “day jobs” and the proposal effort.

Every solicitation is different, and therefore every proposal is different, so you may find it either advantageous or necessary to pull in an individual to work full-time on the proposal effort when you had not originally anticipated that need. For example, if the technical champion and the program manager-designate are the same person and this is a highly technical program, the person carrying both functions will probably be putting in all available time (which may mean all waking hours!) to your proposal. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the orals coach, the legal counsel, and the evaluation team members. These functions are very likely as needed only. The remaining functions are somewhere in the middle, again depending on the character of your response.

To get an idea of how much space you may need, here is a sample list of those functions needing full-time workspace:

Here is a sample list of those functions needing space on a part-time or as-needed basis:

Remember these functions (defined in detail in Chapter 6) might be carried out by one person per function or, in large projects, by multiple people handling each function. So as you estimate office space or workstations needed, try to forecast as best you can the number of offices needed per person, not just per function.

The ideal circumstance is for proposal team members to be able to see the other team members, face-to-face, and not via teleconference. But realistically, for most large proposals, this is very close to impossible to achieve. The important proposal team members are likely to be from different divisions of your company or from companies serving as subcontractors. Typically, these people work at locations away from the proposal development site and may even live or work in different time zones.

When building—or rebuilding—a physical space for proposal development, the factors to consider fall into three categories:

These issues will require you or your top management to sponsor any of the actions coming from answers to these questions. In very large companies, the answers to these questions may involve high-level officers from throughout the company.

Choosing the right physical facilities is important to functional success. Considerations are:

Your facilities should include at least one conference room, capable of handling the proposal team’s daily stand-up meeting. The room should contain a speakerphone of better quality than the typical desktop telephone. There’s no point in spending money on personnel, and then having remote team members get frustrated and not be able to contribute because they cannot hear what’s going on in the daily meetings because of poor audio equipment.

You’ll also need a projector and a screen. The projector can be driven by a computer to show the attendees your daily broadcast material and other documents you want them to see.

Web conferencing tools are a great help. These tools allow all participants, even those in different physical locations, to see, in real time, the documents you are discussing. Then everyone has a chance both to receive current information and to contribute to the discussion.

Somewhere (often but not always, in the largest conference room available) you need wall space to show the then-current versions of the proposal documents. The presence of these current document versions is a rapid and reliable reflection of where the team is on individual sections and helps stimulate the laggards (if any) to keep their sections up to par with the other parts. And it helps TM view the state of proposal completion. The real benefit is that Joe, writing the management plan, can see what Teresa is writing in the technical plan and can spot any similarities or, more importantly, differences in the company story. There is no substitute for such a feedback mechanism. Even in well-run proposal efforts, individuals concentrate on their own parts but need to see what’s going on concurrently in other parts of the proposal.

Of course, each team member must have his own computer or at least free access to one. Sharing computers is a bad idea if this results in any team member having to waste time waiting for a computer to free up. And software support should load each computer with the same versions of software.

You must take steps to secure the proposal team’s work from slipping into the hands of your competition. Industrial espionage is a fact in today’s competitive world. As in a game of Bridge, “a peak is worth two finesses.” If a competitor can get its hands on even preliminary versions of your proposal, then counter-strategies become easy. This could be enough to tip the scales away from your solution and into the hands of another company.

Have your information technology support people, helped by the security staff, configure a secure network for the proposal team’s use. The complexity ranges from very simple to massively complex, so your security measures will vary accordingly. This is very basic but can be overlooked in the enthusiasm to get the proposal out the door.

One way to reduce your security exposure is to prohibit the use of memory sticks and other portable storage devices within your proposal development center. For classified proposals, you surely must obey government restrictions while handling data classified by the government (Official Use Only, Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, and above). The detailed requirements vary greatly, depending on the sensitivity of the data.

Of all the parts of the proposal, the most sensitive is the data in the cost proposal because if it falls into the hands of your competitors, they can do great damage. You can only imagine the damage you would suffer if your competition knew your cost models and cost figures. Therefore, you must apply the most stringent restrictions to your cost proposal.

Your central development space should have access control, limited to only those people who need to know what’s going on with the proposal. This prevents unwanted access to materials by people who have no business reason to be in a space with proprietary data.

It’s a good idea to have a designated security sergeant with the job of patrolling the proposal area several times a day, looking for security violations. The common violations are discarding proprietary materials in the normal wastebaskets and having meetings with nonteam members in the proposal space. Discuss security issues at least once a week at the team’s daily stand-up meetings.

The Least You Need to Know