Finding "Volunteers" PDF Print E-mail

Someone also once said that "God is in the details," so you should keep your eye out for someone who's looking to score points with the Almighty. You may not relish the idea of finding every detail in the RFP, but the truth is that there are those who enjoy this kind of thing.

The best candidate is usually the Proposal Manager or a VERY junior staff person. That's because of the criticality of the job. EVERY detail must make it onto the checklist, so you don't want someone who's liable to list only the elements of the scope of work. You want him or her to catch the production details that are often tucked away in the RFP, things like font style, margins, use of color, number and form of the copies, etc.

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The firm badly needed a big win. Their engineering staff decided to concentrate their efforts on a Department of Energy proposal. "This thing is made for us," the lead engineer said as he handed out his checklist. "Here are the specs." But what he didn't understand is that those "specs" included very rigid requirements for the document, not just the scope of work. So when the document ran about half a page over the page limit (a detail he had noticed) he told the secretary typing it to adjust the margins. The final document was shipped with margins that were .85. The RFP had stated that margins couldn't be less than 1 inch. The result was that a proposal they had spent four months preparing was rejected on the basis of non-compliance. A clerk at the DOE was charged with going through each proposal and measuring the margins. No one even read it.

 
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