Proposal Software: Introducing Privia

We have worked with a number of proposal software packages. Most are only marginally better than a manual approach. Software that can spit out a proposal when you click a button doesn't exist, unless you sell a commodity. Software can't do much to help you think through what should go in your proposal. Re-useable content solutions only work for businesses that do the same thing over and over again. Similar is not the same. For most businesses, instead of saving time and improving quality, a re-use solution will just water-down your proposals.

That's why we got excited recently when we were given a demonstration of Privia, a software product developed by a company called SpringCM. Instead of focusing on the document, it focuses on coordinating the efforts of geographically dispersed teams. Instead of automating the writing or assembling of a document, it facilitates a team's ability to work together, exchange information, collaborate on solutions, and track their progress.

Unfortunately, our excitement didn't last through our first attempt to use the software on a real proposal. With great power and sophistication comes a learning curve. Getting people who are already stressed out about doing a proposal to adopt new software is a challenge. If you force them to use it, then you are the bad guy and will have trouble getting them to go along with your other, more important recommendations about what to do to win the proposal. That's not really Privia's fault. It's very easy to use considering how powerful it is. But it still has a learning curve.

Privia provides online workspaces where groups of people can work on proposals together. It enables you to create folders for the proposal and control access to them. It provides a check-in/out system, with version control and search/retrieval. This gives you a web-accessible place to work on a proposal with a virtual team. It also provides a repository for re-use files. It provides version control and it enables you to track assignments. I consider these features to be the basics and Privia is not the only software solution that can provide them. However, it is when proposal software packages go beyond this level that they tend to get into trouble and where Privia is the most interesting.

But I found myself skipping it and I'm a techno-geek. It slowed me down. Maybe if I invested more time in it I could have seen sufficent payback to make it worth it. I think that's the most important thing to note. You have to invest in using it. It can bring many improvements, but they come at a cost. What you get out of it will be in proportion to what you put into it.

Privia has a seriously powerful workflow system that is extremely promising and extremely disappointing at the same time. First, even though the user interface uses the equivilent of drag-and-drop flow chart symbols instead of programming, you still have to map out your process into excruciating detail. But where it failed for us is that we couldn't use it to implement the MustWin Process that we developed to provide a fully documented off-the-shelf process for people to easily implement. It seems like that would be a match for proposal software with workflow capabilities, but we ran into a little snag. Iterations must be finite. You can have loops that continue until a condition is met. There must be a finite number of loops. Anyone who has worked on even a single proposal in the real world knows that things change, schedules stretch, and you don't always know precisely how long things will take, and even if you do, there's a good chance that you're wrong. Not only do people not submit their assignments on time, they submit them with problems that must be corrected. You have no way of predicting the specific number of cycles that things will go through. Since we couldn't use the workflow system to implement the MustWin Process, we couldn't use it. Instead of a tool for automating the process, this turned Privia into a web-based file transfer and collaboration tool. There are many of those available, and they don't cost nearly as much.

Another promising feature is that Privia reaches back to the pre-proposal phase, providing a repository for intelligence as it is collected. This is important because during business development and capture management a lot of intelligence regarding the customer, opportunity, and the competitive should be collected. Unfortunately, because we couldn't implement our process, it became a lead tracking system with an online file repository. That's useful, but it's not a fully automated solution.

If you are prepared to hire or dedicate staff to learn how to use it properly, have proposal participants with sufficient technical skills to accept and use it, and are willing to invest in providing licenses for everyone who might touch the proposal, software like Privia might make sense. For everyone else, I recommend caution. What we think software should be able to do, and the reality of living with it are two different things. Software like this is an all or nothing proposition. Either you dive in and make it part of your enterprise, or you make do with far less expensive tools that only do most of what you think software should be capable of.

I could see a company building itself around a platform like this. Providing licenses for everyone, putting the time into organizing everything they do around it, and taking the time to train all their employees. You'd have to do it while the company is small or else it would be like hearding cats. Get the core of the company to make the paradigm shift and then extend it as you grow. There are two problems with this: small business can't afford to do it, and it's a high risk bet-the-company kind of move.

I have mixed feelings writing this. On one hand, Privia is the best proposal software I have ever seen — possibly the best proposal software ever written. On the other hand, I wouldn't spend my own money on it. Your mileage may vary.

Return the Favor! Show the author of this article some love and appreciation by posting a link to it, tweeting it, or emailing a friend and telling them about it. Thanks!

PropLIBRARY is our professional-grade tool for accelerating, inspiring, guiding, and improving your proposals
The PropLIBRARY Knowledgebase provides step-by-step guidance to help you: Get ready to win before the RFP is even released Develop win strategies Plan, write, and produce a winning proposal Base proposal quality on what it takes to win Comes with online training!	>> Click here to learn more about the features and benefits of using PropLIBRARY

Copyright © 2011. Please review the Terms of Use prior to copying or distributing.