Creating a Low-Tech Proposal Management Tool

Proposal developers sometimes don’t have the luxury of time. Quick proposal deadlines often necessitate agile proposal development. While this is not the ideal, it is a reality.

But the ideal is to have a fully structured, mature proposal process. This includes Blue and Green Teams during the Draft RFP stage and Pink, Red, and Gold Teams during the Final RFP stage. In the right hands, these color teams foster a deep, meaningful focus on competitive and client intelligence gathering, solutioning, win theme development, pricing strategy, compliant and compelling content development, management review, copy editing, and layout editing—all of which can help you resonate with the government customer, edge out competing companies, and win the proposal.

When you do have the luxury of a mature proposal process, it’s like any other process—a machine that has many moving parts working in concert with one another. To keep a proposal machine finely tuned and lubricated, a proposal manager needs to track and orchestrate all of those moving parts. To do this, a proposal manager needs a tracking system. Proposal management software does exist—Loopio, PandaDoc, and Proposify to name a few. However, many companies—even relatively large companies—do not use sophisticated proposal-management tools. How then can a proposal manager track and orchestrate a proposal process effectively without such high-end software?

The answer: create a low-tech proposal management tool.

Using a simple spreadsheet, any proposal manager can create a proposal-management tool that records and tracks everything from project schedules to compliance requirements and risk items. Based on my experience managing proposals, I have created and used such a tool to effectively manage proposals. Using an industry-standard spreadsheet, I have developed eleven different tabs that capture the essential areas of an average proposal.

But such a low-tech proposal development tool is open to being easily modified to suit any number of proposal management needs—one only needs to create a new tab or informational field to address a particular area of a proposal process. Whatever your specific proposal management needs may be, the following are some foundational elements that I recommend for a low-tech proposal management tool.

Opportunity Overview Tab. This tab documents particular areas such as the government’s contract mission and scope, financial data, client data, competition data, and key dates. Throughout these areas, you can record critical information such as opportunity name, NAICS code, program mission, program requirements, period of performance, competition, Draft RFP release date, Final RFP release date, and proposal submittal date.

Solicitation Highlights Tab. This tab documents the highlights of sections L, M, and C in the solicitation. (For a complete recording of the solicitation and all of its passages, use the Compliance Matrix tab, which I discuss below.)

Strategies and Decisions Tab. This tab records significant proposal strategies and decisions that have been made by executive management, capture management and proposal management. Strategies include, but are not limited to, win themes, solutions, and teaming.

Project Schedule Tab. This tab contains relatively straightforward schedule information, including meetings, reviews, and various due dates.

Teams Tab. This tab identifies team members for each team—from the Black Hat Team and the Blue Team during the Draft RFP stage to the Pink Team, Red Team, Gold Team, Green Team, and White Glove Team during the Final RFP stage.

Question and Answers Tab. This tab records questions to the government as well as the government’s responses. It also identifies the impact of the government’s answers upon the original solicitation.

Amendments Tab. This tab records solicitation amendments and their significant contents. Similar to the Questions and Answers tab, this table identifies the impact of the amendments upon the original solicitation.

Volumes Tab. This tab identifies the proposal volumes to be delivered to the government per the solicitation as well as who is responsible for each volume and the sections within each volume. It also records the development status of each volume and volume section.

Compliance Matrix Tab. This tab records the entire solicitation—most importantly, content from sections L, M, and C. Section titles and text passages in the solicitation are recorded in full. It’s also helpful to apply categories to each of the L, M, and C text references being captured. Categories such as Functional Requirements, Security, Deliverables, Staffing/Pricing, and Reps & Certs (among others) can help various team members to easily locate and focus on solicitation text passages within the compliance matrix that are directly relevant to them. The compliance matrix also serves as a tool for performing compliance checks of the proposal during each relevant color team review.

Action Items Tab. This tab tracks miscellaneous proposal-development activity that other tabs do not track (such as Project Schedule and Volumes). This tab identifies the owner of each action item as well as other pertinent information such as due date, status, and completion date.

Risks Tab. Since proposal development can be severely impacted by significant risks, it is important to identify and track risks. This tab tracks each risk along with a description of the risk, the risk owner, and the status.

Again, it’s important to note that such a low-tech solution can be tailored to any specific proposal-development project. The tabs and the informational elements that I’ve identified for each tab are strong guidelines but are not meant to provide a static form—they can be modified. In this sense, the use of a simple spreadsheet can actually have an advantage over more advanced proposal-management software—you can easily modify and arrange the data fields of a spreadsheet instead of being locked into the user interface data elements of a formal proposal-management application system.

It's also important to recognize that this low-tech proposal-management tracking solution is a living informational entity—it’s only as good as the updates that you put into it thoughout the proposal project. Stale data has little value and can harm or possibly derail a proposal.

This solution is also not meant to be just a passive, post-activity record. No matter how updated the proposal data may be, it’s meant to be an active repository of proposal-development information that you can use to proactively manage a proposal and its ever-changing complex web of activities, resources, deadlines, and critical solicitation information.

To manage a proposal without any kind of management system like this can potentially be a significant risk to your proposal and could jeopardize its success.