Proposaling

So those of us who work in proposals have invented a new verb - proposaling. It's the action of working on proposals.

Working on proposals - proposaling - is exhausting work. Tensions almost always are running high because there are tight deadlines and, almost always, people are running behind. Somehow even when the Request for Proposal (RFP) includes a reasonable delivery deadline - say a month or longer - all the work doesn't get done on time and you still end up pushing, pushing, pushing until the very end.

But more often - most of the time - the time to deliver is shorter than everyone would like. About 10 working days a lot of the time. Particularly on task order proposals. For those of you not in the business, those are proposals that are released under an existing IDIQ (indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity). The government issues IDIQs to restrict the number of eligible companies for those task order proposals. Only a company that has won a contract under the IDIQ can then bid on the subsequent task order proposals. Because the overall terms of the contract have already been set under the IDIQ, the task orders usually have shorter deadlines. In theory, companies should have a lot of the information pulled together already - whatever was pulled together for the IDIQ proposal in the first place.

Except that IDIQs go one for years. And years. And years. And companies change their focus. They have new programs that they want to emphasize. Maybe their partners have changed or need to change.

The organizations that talk about the best practices for proposals always talk about preparing early. Get your resumes together. Get your past performance citations together. There's lots of prep work you can do before the RFP actually comes out.

Well, that's all good in theory. And it's true that it helps to get some of that work prepared. But the resumes will have to be tweaked to emphasize the right qualifications. The past performance citations will have to be updated with the last contract information.

And the real truth of the matter is that the two things that take the longest in developing a proposal are the technical solution and the cost volume - specifically the staffing plan, the rates associated with those people, and getting to the magic number - the one that will win. The technical solution can be developed to some extent beforehand - if there's a draft RFP. But for those pesky task orders, there's not a draft. It's just 10 days to address the requirements.

And so those of us in proposaling are sympathetic with each other, even when we work for rival companies. We all understand the challenges of proposaling. We know the late nights, junk food dinners, skipped lunches, short tempers, and production glitches.

Proposaling is not for sissies.