Chapter 14
Getting Down to the Business of a Response
In This Chapter
• Actions to take the first five days
• The sections of the Uniform Contract Format (UCF)
• Focus on Section M
• The kickoff meeting
• Bid Decision Point #3
The first several days of the formal proposal effort are critical for ultimate success. By this point, you’ve planned an overarching strategy for your response; you know what documents you need; and you’ve set up a home for the proposal operations. Now you’re ready to get down to the serious business of creating the proposal.
This chapter gives you specific actions to take at this early stage of the process, including what to do in the all-important kickoff meeting.
The First Five Days Start with Day One
When planning your initial activities, start with the first five days as they are critical to proposal success. Of course, each proposal is unique in terms of complexity, total amount of time it will take, and size and makeup of the proposal team, but certain activities are inevitably going to be a part of nearly every proposal process.
The most important task in the first few days is a serious reading of the solicitation. This starts on day one and lasts as long as it takes. For complex solicitations, you’ll be fortunate to complete this in the first five days.
On day one of the first five days, you have 10 tasks to focus on. They are:
1. Do a thorough, critical assessment of your own strengths and weaknesses as a proposal team.
2. Ban the term “boilerplate” from your vocabulary.
3. Strategize about the customer relationship.
4. Create a schedule for delivery of products or services.
5. Do a detailed analysis of the differences between the draft and final solicitation.
6. Create the “60-Second Justification” for your win.
7. List four ways to keep the cost/price folks involved.
8. Load the electronic bulletin board with contact info.
9. Confirm the leadership roles and reporting lines.
10. Prepare for the tasks to come.
Don’t worry if you’re not sure how to go about doing some of these things or aren’t exactly certain what they mean. I offer this list as a handy reference and will provide more details on each activity in the following sections.
Assess Your Team’s Strengths and Weaknesses
I’m often asked to help to rescue proposal efforts that are in trouble. The reasons for the need to rescue an effort are varied. It’s enough to say that the progress toward submitting a winning proposal is disappointing, and a change in direction is necessary, and the sooner the better. When I arrive on the scene, I ask three questions:
• Where’s the executive summary?
• Where’s the proposal outline?
• Where’s the capture plan?
These three documents, the executive summary, the proposal outline, and the capture plan, give a rapid, accurate assessment of the proposal team’s readiness to begin a serious proposal effort. Unless all three exist and are in a reasonable amount of detail, the proposal team is not ready to proceed at full speed. You must immediately begin a remedial action to create these or increase the amount of detail in them.
Ban the Boilerplate
Every solicitation is unique, and every proposal should be, too, so from day one help everyone recognize that this process is not going to be about simply recycling old proposal material with a cut-and-paste effort. Instead of boilerplate, encourage the team to think of the proposal content as being made up of new materials as well as some carefully chosen old materials on file, all tailored to the customer’s wants as expressed in this solicitation.
Every team member should know both the usefulness of boilerplate materials and their potential misuse. Such materials can be useful as a starting point for describing your solution, but the danger is that those materials will be simply adopted from previous work without the proper analysis of the direct applicability. You will need to modify or tailor just about all materials to your new solution.
def•i•ni•tion
Boilerplate is the text and visuals used in a previous proposal or other presentation for another purpose. These materials may be out of date, incorrect, or otherwise not applicable to your solutions for this new customer.
Strategize About the Customer Relationship
Review what you know about the customer and who on your team knows the customer, and figure out how you can capitalize on the name and face recognition you’ve built. Involve the program manager-designate, technical leader, and business manager in this process.
Create a Schedule for Delivery of Products or Services
This schedule should demonstrate your knowledge of the customer’s program and serve as a valuable communication tool with your own creation team. It should be a joint product, with the technical people and the management people working together to show what will be available when. The best schedules of this type show the delivery dates of the customer’s important products or services. This schedule answers the ustomer’s implicit question, “When will I get my products?” If this is good, your customer’s working level evaluators will use your schedule to explain the program to others on the evaluation team.
Analyze the Draft vs. Final Solicitation
There isn’t always a draft solicitation. Sometimes a customer just issues a final solicitation. But even if there is no draft solicitation, you may be able to identify a previous solicitation from that customer, perhaps even including enough detail about what the customer might have in mind, to serve as a stand-in for a draft. But if there is neither a formal draft, nor something to substitute for a draft, you may just skip this section.
Task two of your smartest people to create a detailed analysis of the differences between the draft solicitation and the final solicitation. Remember those differences separate winners from losers within the customer organization, and therefore greatly influence your own decisions on proposal creation.
Create a 60-Second Justification of an Award to Your Company
All this is just conjecture and will never be delivered to the customer, but create a short statement in the form of a brief press release. This is an announcement your customer might very well use to announce the award of this contract to your company. (Extra credit: pretend you’re writing that corresponding statement for your toughest competitor.)
Get the Cost/Price Folks Involved
List four ways you intend to keep the cost/price experts intimately involved in the proposal creation process. Include in your list where those individuals will sit with the other members of the proposal team during the creation effort. Deduct points if the chief technical guru is sitting closer to either the proposal manager or the capture manager than the cost/price folks. These folks are an integral part of the proposal team and so should be physically close to the proposal team leaders, such as the proposal manager and capture manager, and not off in another building or on another floor.
Load the Electronic Bulletin Board
Gather and record information on all your proposal team members. Include names, phone numbers, beeper numbers, cellular phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. For the relationship manager and the capture manager, also include their home address.
Confirm the Leadership Roles and Reporting Lines
Observe the official end of democracy with a formal ceremony at your first stand-up meeting. The proposal manager officiates, and the capture manager takes note of any nonbelievers. Seriously, it’s important to establish the leadership hierarchy from the get-go so that everyone understands who’s in charge and who has the ultimate say, without, of course, squashing the morale and contributions of those not in leadership roles. It’s a team effort, with the team leadership roles and responsibilities clearly described.
Brace Yourselves
You and your team are about to embark on a wild ride as you begin devoting full effort to winning this government contract. Plan on devoting whatever work hours are necessary to get the job done, and if at all possible, postpone any scheduled vacations. If that’s not possible, make sure the team knows of those absences and has sufficient back-up through shared responsibilities.
Days Two Through Five
Having begun the solicitation analysis on day one, the next four days (or perhaps longer for complex solicitations) will find you continuing to do this difficult and even tedious task. If you’ve been able to do a comparison, publish and discuss the results of the analysis of the differences between the draft solicitation and the final solicitation. There’s no point in paying for a serious analysis and then failing to make the results available to all team members.
By now, you should have a good, solid 05 Proposal Outline and Responsibility Assignment Matrix (RAM).
By the end of day five, you should have a robust set of questions to ask the customer. These questions will help you further get a handle on the solicitation and will continue building your name and face recognition with the customer.
Ask Good Questions and Get Good Answers
Not even the most highly skilled customer procurement shop issues solicitations that are perfect the first time out. Some content is always subject to interpretation, and in a complex solicitation, usually a lot of content requires clarification. Therefore, you are allowed to ask questions of the customer. Solicitations typically state the format, timing, proper addressee, and schedule for agency response to these questions.
Red Flag
The customer’s answers to questions have no effect on the solicitation. It’s usually okay to rely on those answers in creating your proposal. But be sure the KO changes the solicitation. Changes are legitimate only through a formal amendment to the existing solicitation.
Each company usually submits these questions in writing directly to the Contracting Officer (KO). If there is a pre-proposal conference (sometimes called Bidders Conference), then you’ll have a chance to ask questions of the KO. The KO usually solicits those written questions in advance and sometimes also offers to take live questions from the attendees at the conference.
An important part of a winning strategy is to have the right people ask the right questions, in the right way, at the right time. The customer’s responses to your questions give insights into exactly what he wants to buy.
Formulating Good Questions
Asking questions is as much art as science. Avoid simply making a list of questions and submitting them under the terms of the instructions in the solicitation. That said, though, there are only guidelines and principles and no hard-and-fast rules for asking good questions. One route to success is knowing the KO. If you’ve followed the scenario of the technical and marketing interchange, then you know the KO by name and face, and the KO knows you. This makes the process easier.
Formulate your questions so that the answer you really want from the customer is “yes” or at least begins with “yes.” This establishes a positive frame of mind with the customer. Customers would rather say “yes” than “no.”
If you plan to ask questions about internal inconsistencies, incorrect citations, reference to obsolete standards, or similarly negative, even embarrassing, features of the solicitation, seek TM’s guidance in handling what could be a delicate matter. Not only is their wise counsel useful here, but this is also an opportunity for your proposal manager or capture manager to get TM participating in the proposal process.
Beltway Buzz
The customer’s answers do not identify the name of the company asking the question, so you have anonymity.
Finally, remember, as discussed in Chapter 3, the customer limits any communication, including your questions, from you as an offeror to its own KO. A corresponding rule is that your own contracts manager, your CM, should be the single point of contact with the customer KO. This customer rule applies strictly to any communication after release of the solicitation, and it’s a good idea for your side to limit itself to using your own CM to communicate internally as well.
Changing the Customer’s Mind
In some cases, what you really want to do is try to bring about changes in the solicitation. Try phrasing a question that casts doubt about the way the solicitation currently reads, and then suggest an alternate formulation. This can be particularly effective if the solicitation now favors a technical solution different from the one you’re planning to put forward. Justify your requested change in the solicitation in terms that could benefit the customer. Similarly, avoid the perception that you’re just whining about something you don’t like.
Red Flag
Refrain from asking questions for which you can’t stand the answer. Sometimes, it’s better to ask forgiveness (after submission) than permission (as you’re writing the proposal). As scientific and technical people, our training tells us to have all the answers, but that’s not necessarily so in this case. For every tough question, at least consider not asking it because someone else might or for other reasons. This is a really tough judgment call.
The customer’s answers are often very helpful to your proposal team. The KO can give you and your competitors answers to important, pressing questions and can answer questions rather quickly if that’s required. But making amendments to the solicitation can be much slower because amendments may require the review of other influential parties within the customer organization. Be aware, however, that the one and only way the solicitation can be changed is through a formal amendment to it. So unless and until the government makes formal the customer’s answers by changes in the solicitation, the solicitation of record stands.
Questions for Your Own Team
You’ll also need to develop some questions for your proposal team. Here’s an example of a question a team might pose to itself:
The detailed analysis of the differences between the draft solicitation and the final solicitation seem to indicate that our solution is not favored. The changes in Section M are not in our favor but in the favor of our strongest competitor. So what should our next moves be? Which of these actions should we take?
• Ignore the changes, and move on with the proposal effort?
• No-bid this one with the no-bid letter to the customer?
• Consult with another competitor and be willing to team with that competitor, with us as either the prime or perhaps as a subcontractor?
• Change our own solution to be more in line with the way the solicitation has changed?
This question is clearly not the type you want the customer to see and would be answered only by the proposal team. This is also another good way to involve TM in the process—bring the thorny questions to them!
Should You Request More Time?
By the end of day five, you may have the sinking feeling that a very large amount of activities and milestones lie ahead of you and your team and not enough time to create a really good, winning proposal. For any number of reasons, you may see the need to request an extension of the due date for your proposal.
If you do request an extension, strive to craft your request so that it appeals to the customer, not just your organization.
Red Flag
Avoid asking for more time as a knee-jerk reaction. Request an extension only if it benefits you in relation to the competition and only after careful deliberation. Sometimes you’d like to have more time, but that would just give the competition a chance to catch up, too.
Sample Extension Justification #1
At the 09-06 conference of (prospective offerors) (Agency KO) estimated that answers to questions submitted by the due date of 09-07 would be answered in about two weeks. It is now 09-28, which is three weeks past that conference, and one week past the estimated time for response to questions. The delay in answering the initial set of questions has caused this offeror to delay completion of critical portions of our solution and therefore critical portions of our own response.
Sample Extension Justification #2
This offeror has experienced difficulty in relating the data on site locations, as provided by the (service provider), to physical locations. Efforts to engage service provider and other sources to resolve this problem have proven to be unsuccessful and have required much more time than we had planned. At this time, we have significant risks associated with this problem, and we require more time to resolve this issue and to allow accurate planning and pricing.
Sample Extension Justification #3
Below are the same three paragraphs we submitted earlier to the government, to justify a one-time, large extension:
1. As against the (redacted) design requirement of (previous submission) (which was derivative of the previously issued redacted procurement), (XYZ Opportunity) requires TWO complete designs: one for the Commercial (shared) (capability) and another, separated design for the Dedicated (redacted).
2. Unique to (XYZ Opportunity) is the requirement to develop (several) unique (redacted) responses.
3. The (XYZ Opportunity) submission is a response to a Statement of Work and not for an entirely new contract. But we must write to and price to a complexity and level of detail (redacted) that is greater than that required of (redacted). Further, we must develop two—not one—technical solutions and the accompanying (description of work). And the design complexities must be balanced against the ability to deliver competitively priced solutions.
These three separate, but related, requirements compete for the same (fixed) resources within all (prospective offerors) and represent a significant effort to prepare responsive proposals as compared with requirements of previous proposals.
In light of the above, we believe that a significant extension in the due date is in the best interests of the government, as well as all the prospective offerors.
On the basis of the above, we request an extension in the due date for (XYZ Opportunity) to 3:00 P.M. on Friday, 11-06.
Understanding the Uniform Contract Format
All solicitations don’t follow the Uniform Contract Format. However, many do, and so it’s important for you to understand the details of this format.
Invitations for Bids (IFBs) and Requests for Proposals (RFPs) must use the Uniform Contract Format (UCF). This format has stood the test of time, and experienced individuals know this format like the back of their hands. It includes 13 sections from A to M.
def•i•ni•tion
Uniform Contract Format (UCF) is the format (Sections A through M) that must be used for invitations for bids (IFBs) and requests for proposals (RFPs).
Here are the sections of the Uniform Contract Format (UCF):
A: Solicitation/Contract Form
B: Supplies/Services and Prices/Cost
C: Descriptions/Specifications/Work Statement
D: Packaging and Marking
E: Inspection and Acceptance
F: Deliveries or Performance
G: Contract Administration Data
H: Special Contract Requirements
I: Contract Clauses
J: List of Attachments
K: Representation, Certifications, and Other Statements
L: Instructions, Conditions, and Notices
M: Evaluation Factors
Don’t be distracted by slightly different names for the sections of your first solicitation. For example, Section L may be called “Instructions to Offerors”; Section M may be called “Evaluation Factors for Award”; and Section C may be called the “Statement of Work (SOW). It’s all the same thing.
Let’s look at each section in more detail.
A: Solicitation/Contract Form
This is a standard form, such as an SF-1449 or SF-33, and contains all the really important information about the competition proper: issuing office, contacts, due dates, solicitation number and type. All proposal team members must read and understand this page, at least to know what’s there. Some of the terms have specific meanings that are fathomable only to experienced proposal gurus and/or contracts managers.
B: Supplies/Services and Prices/Cost
This section is your opportunity to describe your costs/prices. The format varies with the type of products being bid, but this section shows the offered costs/prices by Contract Line Item Number (CLIN). Again, this is a form best understood by the contracts and pricing staff. Don’t worry too much if you don’t understand the fine details.
C: Descriptions/Specifications/Work Statement
This section lists the stuff to be procured under this contract. This is often abbreviated as the Statement of Work (SOW) or the Statement of Objectives (SOO). This is typically detailed and says as precisely as possible what the contractor will be required to deliver or provide.
D: Packaging and Marking
This section tells how the deliverables are to be packaged and marked, whether to commercial or military specifications. This is of little importance to most proposal team members.
E: Inspection and Acceptance
This section as well as Section F gives the details of how the government will receive the products. This is particularly important because once the contractor has complied with the details of this section and has a formal sign-off from a government agent, this can be a trigger for the customer to pay the contractor for its work, in accordance with the other provisions of the contract. Without a definitive sign-off process, it could be difficult to determine just when the contractor is allowed to bill and collect from the government. After all, it’s not about getting the contract or performing under the contract, it’s about getting paid!
F: Deliveries or Performance
This section specifies the requirements for time, place, and method of delivery or performance. This may include a formal Delivery of Performance Schedule.
G: Contract Administration Data
This section says exactly how the government will pay the contractor. In recent years, the act of payment has been greatly simplified and streamlined, and the government now pays by electronic means, into the proper bank account. This paperless process avoids the problems of the past, with hard copy checks being lost, then found, and getting all messed up. The current system is far superior.
H: Special Contract Requirements
This section is where the government sticks any contract requirements that apply to this contract. Someone should read all of these during the first few days of the release of the solicitation. The contracts manager and the company counsel are obvious choices. There have been cases in which the right people did not read them with understanding and really bad things happened to the contract awardee.
I: Contract Clauses
This section contains clauses that apply to this contract. Some contract clauses are incorporated by reference, and some are stated in their entirety. See comment on Section H, above.
J: List of Attachments
This section is a grab bag of attachments to the solicitation. Whatever doesn’t fit anywhere else, but is essential to the solicitation, ends up here. Again, someone should read these attachments very carefully and hope there are no unpleasant surprises.
K: Representation, Certifications, and Other Statements
This section is often tagged Reps & Certs. Here, you are asked to assert many things about your company. You could be asked to certify that you have not been debarred from getting government contracts, that you are not owned by a foreign company or organization, and the like.
L: Instructions, Conditions, and Notices
This section is the most important to those responsible for creating and submitting a compliant proposal. Its importance means that the proposal manager in particular must read and understand every word. This section is either the most complex or at least among the most complex in the solicitation. You’ll find that a large percentage of the questions to the KO comes from this section.
M: Evaluation Factors
This section says most clearly what the customer really wants to buy. This is “what counts as good.” Second only to Section L, this section typically is the origin of the most questions. The good news (for the customer) is that the customer can make (almost) any rules of evaluations and awards. The bad news (for the customer) is that once the rules are in place, the customer is bound by those rules. Many successful protests of awards rely on the failure of the customer to follow its own rules.
Section M
Chapter 1 introduced the concept of the word problem, a description of how the customer plans to evaluate the offers. Rather than give a straight quantitative weight to the various factors for award, the customer may say something like the example provided here, which is from an actual USAF solicitation, with some identifying, non-essential information replaced by “XXX”):
F. EVALUATION FACTORS (SAMPLE)
1. Proposals:
Award will be made to the offeror proposing the combination most advantageous to the government based upon an integrated assessment of the evaluation factors and subfactors described below.
Factor 1: Technical
Subfactor 1: Management
Subfactor 2: XXX Training Program Development
Subfactor 3: Courseware Development
Subfactor 4: Classroom/Simulator Instruction
Subfactor 5: XXX Mission Simulator/XXX Operator Support
Subfactor 6: Registrar’s Office Management
Factor 2: Past Performance
Factor 3: Cost/Price
2. Order of Importance:
Technical acceptability is a prerequisite to the trade-off between cost/price and past performance. The Order of Importance is used to explain how the other factors will be traded off on technically acceptable proposals.
For all technically acceptable proposals, Factor 2 (Past Performance) will be evaluated on a basis approximately equal to Factor 3 (Cost/Price). Cost/price will contribute substantially to the selection decision.
3. Evaluation Methodology:
Initially, the government technical evaluation team will evaluate the technical proposals on a pass/fail basis, assigning ratings of Acceptable, Reasonably Susceptible of Being Made Acceptable, or Unacceptable. The proposals shall be evaluated against the subfactors listed in paragraph (4) below.
Past Performance will be evaluated on all technically acceptable proposals as described in paragraph (5) below. Cost/Price will be evaluated as described in paragraph (6) below and will be listed from lowest to highest cost/price. The SSA will then assess the price and past performance ratings for all evaluated offers to make an integrated assessment for a best value award decision.
Using the nonquantitative evaluation process described above, it is possible for the government to award to just about any of the bidders. Note that the six subfactors under “Factor 1. Technical” are not explicitly weighted. Are these in order of decreasing importance? (Sometimes the customer gives you at least that helpful hint.) You don’t know from this text. If this was a solicitation you were considering bidding on, I would recommend at least you consider asking a question in an effort to obtain more details about this method. You could ask the KO to provide a relative weight, at least among the six technical subfactors, and then (and this might be a stretch) the relative importance of past performance and cost on the one hand and technical on the other.
Government Insider
Sometimes, the solicitation reflects an uncertainty or confusion by the customer between past performance, which is “How well did you do YYY?” and experience, which is “What kind of work have you done?” If the solicitation is unclear, ask a question.
Note also that management is a subfactor within technical. This is not unusual or contradictory to my general process of separating the technical and management solutions.
People experienced in the proposal creation game are creatures of habit and usually know which sections of the solicitation are of greatest importance to them. I have been more than slightly amused by this experiment. I take a hard copy of a solicitation, bound in a three-ring binder and properly tabbed, A to M. I place the solicitations before a group of individuals, ask them to spend five minutes with the solicitation, and give me at least two questions that occur to them and are perhaps worthy of asking the customer. Without further conversation or hints, I can, without fail, determine each individual’s interest. The technical people, who have an interest in what would actually be done under this contract, study Section C, Statement of Work. The proposal manager and others on the team who must deliver the proposal documents study Section L, Instructions to Offerors. And the business development folks, with their compensation package at least partially dependent on winning contracts, study Section M, Evaluation Criteria.
Beltway Buzz
Even for programs involving high technology, the factor discriminating the winning proposal from the losers is the quality of the management solution. Sometimes, all competitors offer a similar technical solution. Then the winner is the company with the best management solution.
The General and Specific Parts of a Kickoff Meeting
Chapter 12 introduced the kickoff meeting with the meeting agenda. The kickoff meeting has two parts: the general and the specific.
The general part features the items that are of interest to all the participants. Your challenge here, as the prime contractor, is to have a representative of each of your subcontractors in attendance. Aim for as high in the subcontractor organization as possible. This is to convince the subs that you know what you’re doing and that you have a specific, detailed Proposal Development Plan.
Under the best of circumstances, as the prime, you will probably be able to hold the attention of your high-level audience for only a short time. Once you’ve shown the subcontractors’ top people what they need to know, then dismiss perhaps half of the room and get down to a smaller group for the specific part.
The specific part of the meeting is limited in participation to those who are actually going to assist with the proposal creation. This includes, very importantly, the three modules of Just-In-Time training of the SMEs and authors.
The following table is a sample agenda for a kickoff meeting.
Team TBS Kickoff Meeting
Agenda
April 22, 2010, 9:00 A.M.
Just-In-Time Training at the Kickoff Meeting
Use the following three training modules during the final part of the kickoff meeting. This part of the meeting typically lasts between 20 and 40 minutes, depending on the experience and interest of the attendees. Each module has specific importance to the tasks immediately ahead. This training is consistent with the standards for training, as described in Appendix E.
• Solicitation Analysis Every important proposal team member should do a thorough analysis of the solicitation; the more eyes, the better. This training focuses on how to analyze the solicitation.
• Proposal Writing This training puts all the authors and the available SMEs on the same page. The training stresses simplicity and directness and cautions against convoluted sentences, which confuse the evaluators.
• Evaluation Teams The reason to include this module is that the subcontractors are present at the kickoff meeting, and this is an excellent opportunity to set your expectations for their people’s participation in the evaluation teams. For you, the prime contractor, this has a double whammy: 1) you build team spirit by the requirement for using some of their people on the evaluation teams, and 2) you reduce your own cost, by sharing the cost of the evaluation teams with your subcontractors.
Three Critical Decisions for Bid Decision Point #3
Now that the final solicitation is available to you, begin replacing estimates or guesses about the three critical sections, C, L, and M, with the real content.
This is an excellent time to make final decisions on the subcontractors you’ll use for this effort. If you’re a subcontractor, it’s a great time to make final decisions on which team you’ll join (if that’s still uncertain) and to begin establishing yourself as a preferred subcontractor, through the actions described in Chapter 9.
The Least You Need to Know
• Careful analysis of the solicitation pays large dividends.
• Although the entire solicitation is important, Sections C, L, and M are the most important.
• By the end of the kickoff meeting, the proposal team membership, roles, and responsibilities should be largely complete.
• When given the formal opportunity, ask good questions to learn more about the customer’s wants.
• As a subcontractor, seize any opportunity to help your prime contractor and thereby improve your standing on the team.
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