Common Challenges Faced in Proposal Management
The Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) offers many benefits for proposal professionals. The organization has worldwide chapters that host in-person and virtual events for networking and learning about new technologies and best practices.
Communication with subject matter experts (SMEs) is critical to creating compelling RFP responses. But collaborating with SMEs can be challenging when they are busy with their own full-time jobs.
Requirements Analysis
In this phase, the team collects requirements and confirms they are accurate. It also identifies any gaps that may exist and ensures the requirements align with business or customer needs. This information is documented and recorded. The document also includes a description, project name, and version history.
This process is usually conducted with a systems or software project, but can be used for any type of project. It is important to collect as much relevant data as possible during this analysis phase, as it will help the development team deliver a successful product.
The project proposal management tools and processes that are implemented during this phase can significantly impact the overall success of a proposal. For instance, using a Gantt chart, an online collaboration and communication platform, and a content repository will save valuable time and improve the quality of the proposal. The right tools and systems will also help the team to follow a well-defined checklist, increase transparency, and bring clarity to the entire proposal development process.
Planning
Developing and submitting proposals is a critical business function. The process involves a variety of skills and requires a high level of coordination between multiple departments.
One way to increase your success rate in this area is to adopt project management principles. This will help you manage the proposal process more efficiently and effectively. It will also improve your productivity and your win rate.
Proposal preparation can be a daunting task, especially for teams with limited resources. It is important to plan carefully and set clear expectations for the team members. This will prevent delays and avoid conflicting priorities. It is also important to use a tool that will track progress and provide a dashboard view of the proposal status.
Another important step in the proposal process is preparing the relevant content. This includes client and industry reports, references and case studies. It is essential to keep these materials in the library and update them regularly. A cloud-based solution such as RFP360 allows you to collect, categorize, share and search for content within the knowledge library. It also allows you to track who is viewing which documents and how long they are spending analyzing the contents.
Drafting
Having a clear process for guiding people through considering everything that should go into a proposal can help the drafting phase go faster. It’s a lot less risky than simply handing writers a list of things that they should include and asking them to get it all written up before the deadline.
It’s also important to ensure that the content that SMEs provide is free from grammatical and spelling errors. A single mistake can ruin a whole proposal. It’s helpful to show SMEs the final draft and talk through how proofreading and editing improved it.
Using a custom template that includes boilerplate language and standardized formatting can be another helpful tool for speeding up the drafting process. Providing templates that can be used to respond to multiple RFPs can make the process even more efficient. This saves time and protects against the error-prone manual submission of proposals that can cause significant damage to a business. The drafting phase is also when teams should consider whether to use an off-the-shelf proposal software solution. This can be much quicker than creating custom solutions and can also improve the quality of a response.
Reviewing
As the proposal is reviewed and reworked, the team needs to ensure all the necessary information has been provided. Often this means pulling in documents from other teams within the business. For example, the response to an RFP may require documents from HR, legal, and HSE in addition to the technical solutions being proposed. This is where the need for a well-developed content library comes into play.
A content library is a central hub that allows all the content needed for a proposal to be stored in one place. It includes everything from product or service descriptions, bios and fee tables to proposal sections and visual elements like images, videos and snippets. A library reduces the need to keep re-creating the same content over and over again, saving proposal writers time and reviewers and approvers time trying to track down the latest version. It also ensures that the most up-to-date information is included in every proposal. It also helps to have a robust approval and notification process that ensures all team members are aware of the status of each proposal.
Submission
The final proposal must be polished and ready for submission. This includes ensuring that grammatical and spelling errors are corrected. Also, it is important to make sure all numbers and diagrams are correct. One mistake can cause a potential donor to question your organization’s level of care and attention to detail.
As with any project, time is often not on your side when it comes to putting together a proposal. Trying to meet an unforgiving deadline can lead to stress and anxiety, which can lead to mistakes or oversights in the final proposal.
One way to mitigate this challenge is by implementing a proposal management tool that helps you manage your process and deadlines more efficiently. For example, Colga Collaborate allows you to keep your content library organized and easily accessible for use in future proposals. This saves your team time from having to search for files or recreate them every time a new proposal is created. You can even create templates to follow best practices for balancing text and visuals on each page of your proposal.