Improve your proposal reviews by using Privia

A lot of the pain felt during proposal development centers around the review process.  Over and above all of the issues regarding maintaining focus and coping with egos, the logistics of a formal review require a lot of effort.

Typically, reviewers mark-up hard-copies of the document (or soft copies using “track changes” feature of MS-Word).  At the end of the review, someone has to go through the laborious and time-consuming process of consolidating the changes before they can be implemented.  This can result in a delay of up to a whole day on a big proposal.  It’s even worse when some of the reviewers are remote.  Do they send their changes via FedEx or a really-long fax?  

Privia not only solves the logistical problems, but it has a number of additional benefits:

• Reduced time to consolidate comments.  Time between the review and the deadline is precious. Privia gives some of this time back by eliminating comment consolidation and transmission/delivery time.
• Get the right reviewer to provide feedback. Because it's easier to work with remote reviewers, it becomes easy to get the right reviewers involved.  In a traditional review cycle, sometimes you can’t get the reviewer you want because they can’t travel or leave their customer site.
• Privia's review features can be used for informal reviews that are as important, if not more important, than the big “Red Team” review.

In Privia, when files are opened for “Review,” it opens up in a window where the reviewer can attach a “comment.”  Comments can be attached to a specific item in the text (such as “Add an example from such-and-such project here”), or they can be general comments that are not attached to a specific text-item and apply to the whole document (such as “does not align closely enough with the evaluation criteria”).  Reviewers can respond to the comments placed by other reviewers, and Privia automatically consolidates comments and shows all of the associated discuss threads received.  As soon as the reviewers are done, the comments are ready to act on them and make the necessary revisions to the document.  Re-writes can be cut-and-pasted from Privia's comments tool into the document.

Because it is so easy to comment on documents, you can use it for all of your “color team” reviews and not just the “Red Team.”  You can even use it for informal reviews — just to provide feedback to team members. 

Privia’s workflow features can also be used to support proposal reviews.  For example, you might have technical approach submissions routed to a Lead Engineer for review prior to incorporation into the proposal.  Privia will notify the Lead Engineer when the document is ready for review, collect his/her sign-off, and route the document to the proposal manager.  The Lead Engineer could even use the review feature along with the workflow system to pass comments along.  The ability to route the document and electronically collect sign-offs can also lighten the logistics workload and encourage you to do more quality assurance.

This is the true benefit to using Privia for reviews.  By making reviews easier, you do more of them. At all levels. This not only helps to keep the proposal on track, but ultimately results in a better proposal.  A better proposal produced more easily.  What’s not to love about that?