Laura’s Winning Ideas

Laura Ewing just showed me a new site to research federal contracts.

http://www.usaspending.gov

Very nice interface. I’ve played around with it a few minutes and easily found contracts for clients and their competitors, as well as which agencies are contracting.

Tuck this one in your bookmarks and backup your bookmarks!

Technorati Tags: proposal database,contracts database,competitor data

See if this has happened to you:

A group is assembled which has had experience with the client, and from whom intelligence will be gathered. These are all accomplished professionals, with a competitive nature.

The meeting seems like a squirming pile of puppies. Each person is jockeying to proclaim the most outrageous requirement they’d experienced from this client. As they progress from Pink to Red team reviews, the posturing continues. By the time you are rehearsing for Orals, it is obvious no one is reading the RFP.

Everyone offers advice based on their previous experience, but not tempered by the current RFP. They are all mired in the past, and using their stories to manipulate the future, where they imagine their stories will garner them career advantage. Very little energy is focused on the proposal at hand.

Here’s my advice: When I read an RFP, I’m looking for the differences between previous RFPs and the current RFP. I’m less interested in what the client “has always done” and more interested in the changes they’ve made recently. Ergo, I read the RFP carefully and often.

I’ve never met a client who isn’t trying to improve, prevent previous problems, or tweak the pending procurement. Therefore, looking at the RFP with previous experience is very helpful, as you can identify the changes which will guide you to the winning results. However, advising a proposal team based solely on your previous exposure is less than worthwhile, and may be dangerous.

I once sat through a red team review in which many suggestions were based on prior experience which was not tempered by recent changes in the buying organization. Some of the suggestions were outrageous, some were just plain wrong. One fellow couldn’t get over an experience with the agency that was 6 years old.

The touchy part comes in getting a group of senior folks to read the RFP. You can help by constructing a score sheet based on the RFP, and asking for scores on that sheet.The proposal manager helped this situation by providing score sheets strictly tied to the RFP, allowing comments to be provided on separate sheets, and then distilling the comments on the separate sheets to the few (very few) worthwhile additions to the proposal.

The CIO at Kimberly Clark is working to eradicate tech speak and requires every word of the department email missives to be found in Webster’s Dictionary. (What have we come to that this is revolutionary news?!?)

As reported in the Wall Street Journal’s Tech Blog this week, acronyms must be translated into something meaningful for the recipient.

The time it takes to write with clarity and full explanation, multiplies your effort.

  Time saved by your readers X  Number of readers being addressed = Value of your time spent editing for clarity.

When sending a proposal, the importance of the clarity is multiplied by the dollars involved in your proposed contract.

He also uses the same template I teach for mass email. Begin the message with “ACTION NEEDED:” so the responsible parties know whether they are personally holding up progress or just being informed of progress. In the case of Kimberly Clark, they begin with: If you use this system (fill in specifics here), Please read on.

Even judges find esoteric and acronym laden prose difficult to handle. The Wall Street Journal published this suggestion to make it plain, from a legal ruling by Judge Richard Posner:

“Every esoteric term used by the reinsurance industry has a counterpart in ordinary English, as we hope this opinion has demonstrated…The able lawyers who briefed and argued this case could have saved us some work and presented their positions more effectively had they done the translations from reinsurancese into everyday English themselves.”

In this same case, the judge demonstrated how to make the complex understandable, by his explanation for part of his decision:

“If while you are sitting on your porch sipping Margaritas, a trio of itinerant musicians serenades you with mandolin, lute, and hautboy, you have no obligation, in the absence of a contract, to pay them for their performance no matter how much you enjoyed it.”

All writing benefits from clear writing. If you regularly default to acronym soup, try translating some of your messages and see whether the response doesn’t improve because it took so much less energy to decipher your request.

Though my technical background is only cursory from hanging around engineers and scientists all my professional life, I can always pick out the folks who are spoofing. The truly wise are able to distill the meaning to a plain English explanation. The uncertain and inexperienced hide behind four syllable words and acronyms, hoping we’ll be fooled into thinking the topic too lofty for mere mortals.

Everyone else figures out the same thing. Keep it plain!