Publishing a large proposal can seem an absurdly Herculean endeavor. Conceptualizing, writing,
editing, formatting, and printing a 1,500-page document with 120 graphics? In 30 days? Doesnt seem possible. But it happens all the time.
And theres the rub. Proposal shops (the publishing groups, often embedded in large corporations, that manage these monster productions) are notorious for running staff and subcontractors ragged in a 20-hour-a-day race to publish and deliver these documents on time. The long hours, the rate of burnout, and the level of disorder in these environments are legendary.
As a
proposal editor and the editorial manager in Computer Sciences Corporations (CSC) proposal publishing group for seven years, I oversaw the publication of large, complex, high-quality proposals under extremely tight deadlines. But my team and I managed to avoid the usual angst because we cultivated a structured, organized production environment. You can do it, too.
Along with my lessons learned, heres advice for a saner process from some of the best proposal experts in the business: from CSC, Rhonda Wright, senior manager, and Ginny Furth, proposal coordinator; from Booz Allen Hamilton, Margo Goldman, senior associate, and Carolyn Quinn, associate; and from SM&A, proposal consultant Rachael Neenan.
Rhonda Wright says, Proposal publishing is an art. It has to be, when youre given five days to publish 1,000 pages. As with any art, what you learn from the masters has to be practiced and then adapted to suit your own needs.
Designate a project coordinator
Want a recipe for disaster? Go lean and bring on one freelance editor to proofread your proposal. Then assume that he can format your proposal, make coffee, andoh, yeahorganize your production schedule and workflow. An astonishing number of companies operate in exactly this fashion.
A better way? Assign a dedicated project coordinator to oversee your production schedule and publication process end to end. Having someone manage the details of production lets the head honchos like proposal managers focus on their core responsibility: developing a winning proposal strategy. And it lets your production staff edit, design, and format the document without distraction.
Ideally, your coordinator should be a trained proposal specialist who understands the intricacies of an RFP (request for proposal) and can manage a production workforce of 10 to 30. At minimum, he or she should be highly organized, flexible, and accustomed to working under stiff deadlines.
In addition, Margo Goldman says, coordinators have to have the right personality. They need have to have a certain authority, a certain assertiveness. When they say no, people need to know that they mean it. Carolyn Quinn points out that a coordinator also must be able to stay calm in tense situations. Or as Rachael Neenan puts it, No matter how difficult the situation, you can never blow your stack. Staying professional is so important, because everyone else on the team reacts to you. In other words, if your proposal coordinator loses it, your whole staff is going to lose it, too.
Add key staff
In addition to a project coordinator, you need two other professionals: an editor and a desktop publisher. The
proposal editor will develop a style sheet (sometimes called the wall of truth) for the proposal and edit the document itself. The desktop publisher will develop a style-based template for the proposal (usually in Microsoft Word), format text, and integrate numerous files into one. The desktop publisher, who should be skilled in graphics software, will also build the figures used in the proposal.
If your proposal is of substantial size (say, over 100 pages), these leads will also oversee the work of other editors and desktop publishers assigned to the effort. Because the leads carry so much responsibility, it doesnt pay to force-fit someone into the job whos not fully qualified. According to Wright, Your leads need to be true experts who know what theyre doing. Using people who arent publishing professionals can be very costlyand can ultimately jeopardize the proposal.
By the way, you dont think your proposal needs to be edited? Maybe not, if you dont mind your client reading that hunan resources and a pubic key infrastructure are part of your solution.
Schedule production in detail
A production schedule should work backward from the proposal deadline and incorporate time for writing and revising, designing the proposal cover and the template for the text pages, formatting and laying out the copy,
proposal editing and proofreading, holding author and proposal manager reviews, conducting a final quality check, and printing, assembling, boxing, and delivering the proposal.
Its tempting to forgo putting together a schedule because schedules always slip. But thats exactly why you need one, and why your project coordinator should map out every interim deadline thats required to get from project start to completion. When these deadlines slip, youll indeed have to reconfigure your schedule. But youll know clearly where you are and what still must be done to meet your final deadline.
What to do when your schedule is drifting out of control, but the higher-ups dont seem to care? Remind them of the dollars being wasted by the extra hours spent. If somebody decides at the eleventh hour to change the proposals template, Wright says, a coordinator can explain that making such a change will take a certain number of hoursat a certain number of dollars per hour. When the bosses do the math, chances are theyll drop the idea.
Hold standup staff meetings
Getting your team together for just 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the afternoon can save hours of wasted effort that comes from misunderstanding priorities or job specifications. The purpose of a standup? To assess progress against interim deadlines, assign priorities for the day, answer questions, and adjust your schedule as needed to ensure that the project remains on track. The project coordinator should lead the meeting, and all key production staff should attend.
By the way, a standup meeting means just thateveryone should stand up. Keeping people on their feet nearly guarantees that meetings stay short and focused.
Use progress-tracking logs
Your proposal is 800 pages long, is being written by 23 authors, and is currently divided into 140 separate Microsoft Word files. Do you know where Section II.13.B.iv is?
If you religiously maintain a tracking log, you will. Your log should list every single piece of the document, including the cover, spine, and back cover; the tabs and tables of contents; the cover letter; every text section, broken out by volume, section, and subsection; and all supplemental material, such as appendices and attachments. Your log should track the progress of each piece through each step of the publishing cycle, including writing, editing, formatting, author reviews, and quality checks.
Wright says that she expects her project coordinators to know the status of every single piece of a proposal during every minute of the production cycle. Her coordinators tracking logs allow them to do so.
One of the additional benefits of this system, says CSCs Ginny Furth, is that its standardized and used on all the departments proposals. I can hand off a project Im working on to any other coordinator whos been trained in the process, says Furth. They can keep the project flowing through the evening, so I dont have to be at the office 24 hours a day.
Control workflow and versions
Your editor has spent six hours polishing the executive summary when the proposal manager proudly hands you his rewrite of the file. Guess what? Youve just lost version control.
To avoid these unhappy moments, you need a system for moving files through the production process and ensuring that only one person is handling a file at a time. Your system can be as simple as placing each section of the proposal in a manila folder and not allowing people to work on a section unless they have that very folder in front of them. Or you can load your files into an electronic document-sharing system like Microsoft SharePoint, which allows only one person to check out and work on a file at a time.
One of the things that can really do you in on a proposal is if you lose version control, says Quinn. When authors send us a file to work on, we tell them, Thats it, this is our file now, we own it, dont do anything else to it. We make it very clear who has control over a file at any given time.
Schedule a relief shift
Its not unusual for Goldman to schedule freelance editors to start on a large project at 6:00 p.m. on a Friday or 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday. As soon as she sees that work will flow outside regular business hours, she rings up her freelance staff and books a second shift.
The way that weve avoided burnout over the years is that we have an extensive vendor network, Goldman says. We use a lot of temporary support, both for editing and for design. We try to be very careful about the hours that people work, and we really step up and add staff to spell people when they need it.
Incorporating a second shift into your production schedule allows more work to be done on a given day while avoiding the lowered productivity and increased errors that come from working your production staff 12 or 15 hours a day for weeks at a stretch. It also helps keep your most important professionals fresh and focused when they are on the job.
I am a huge proponent of the life-work balance, says CSCs Wright. We have people who have worked for a us for a long time and who also have spouses and children. People like that arent going to stick around if we arent flexible with their schedules. We ask our staff to go out on a limb for us, and we have to be willing to do the same for them.
Proposal groups that dont operate like this are known as body shops, and they regularly place multimillion dollar deals in the hands of production staff fueled only by a few cups of coffee and a few hours of sleep. Lots of places do it. But that doesnt make it any less risky.
Know when to say no
Quality is a goal, but the deadline is the supreme goal. Proposals submitted to the federal government minutes late have famously been rejectedleaving the submitter with reams of paper and hundreds of thousands of dollars in publishing costs down the drain. Publishing a proposal is not like publishing a novel, says CSCs Ginny Furth. Its not going to be read over and over through generations. When a deadline is in jeopardy, she says, I am not above pulling a folder out of somebodys hands.
Goldman says, Carolyn and I are top-notch editors, but we are also extremely practical people. We know when to let go, and at the end of a project, we will not bother with the trivial.
Last-minute changes to a proposal should be made only if they address RFP compliance issues or resolve errors that are egregious enough to threaten the deal. In other words, should production be held up to insert a missing serial comma? No. To fix a typeface smaller than that allowed by the RFP or a misspelling in the clients name? Yes.
Leave ample time for printing
Remember that the final step of publishingprinting, assembling, and boxing a deliverablealways takes more time than you expect. SM&As Neenan says one of her pet peeves is that everyone thinks that printing magically happens in five minutes. Even people who have been in the proposal business for 15 years consistently underestimate the time thats required. For a large proposal, Neenan recommends building a full day into the schedule dedicated solely to printing and prepping a document for delivery. And by a full day, she means a standard business daynot from 5:00 p.m. one day until 5:00 a.m. the next.
Enjoy what youve created
When you finally have the right staff on your team and the right procedures in place, working on a proposal can actually be a pleasure. The proposal environment is so collaborative, says Furth. Theres such a sense of teamwork and, over time, you become a close family.
Sometimes, you dont even have to talk through what youre doing, says Goldman of the proposal environment. Its like being on the best of the military teamseveryone just knows what to do.
Creating a proposal shop like the one Goldman describes takes time, but its worth it. Your proposals will run more smoothly, fewer people will scream at you, and both you and your staff will enjoy a saner quality of life. Publishing a panic-free proposal isnt easy, but it can be done. Follow the best practices outlined here, and youll have a great chance of putting your next large proposal to bed on timewithout losing too much sleep yourself.
