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Successful Proposals with Remote Participants
Even though we'd like everyone to be co-located and dedicated on a large proposal, it is becoming a rare luxury. These days most large proposals have remote participants. It is not unusual for the number of remote participants to outnumber those in the production center. It's hard enough to run a successful proposal when everyone is together. How do you do it with people you've never met and may never see face-to-face? It takes a lot more than a daily teleconference to be successful in developing a proposal with people you never see. This article outlines some of the issues you need to address. For each item discussed, there are some examples of best practices that are based on using Privia®, a proposal collaboration software platform developed by Synchris.
Expectations, schedules, and assignments must be documented
When you have face-to-face discussions, it may not always be necessary to write everything down. However, when discussions are on the telephone, you need to follow-up with something in writing. It is vital to provide:
- Advance notice of expectations
- A means to measure progress
- Objective criteria for when goals have been met
In addition to providing a place to put proposal files like the schedule, outline, and assignment list, Privia also allows you to attach files to assignments. There are many ways to take advantage of this feature and some of them may not be obvious. For example, with each assignment you can include:
- Instructions, guidelines, or even manuals
- Background information or research
- A self-evaluation checklist
- A copy of the evaluation criteria from the RFP
- Notes from a meeting where expectations were discussed
- A template document to be completed
- Links to boilerplate or other relevant documents
Privia will also automatically keep a Gantt chart up-to-date, showing you exactly where you stand with regard to deadlines.
Access
If people can't access your proposal software, it won't be used. Computer limitations and firewalls can make it difficult to use software remotely. Privia gets around this by providing more than one way to access the application and connect with your team. The preferred way is to install a program. But if you can't install software on your PC or have a firewall issue, you can also use a pure-web interface. This helps ensure that people in the field can access the system on short notice, whether or not they "have the software installed."
More frequent assignment deadlines
You must be in constant contact with proposal contributors when you can't see them to know what they are doing. It is better to have them make partial submissions frequently, rather than give them a lot of time and a final deadline. You can't afford to get to a final deadline and find out that a remote participant has gone AWOL or is working on something that is different from what you expected.
More frequent deadlines will only compound the version control problem that you have when using email to transfer files. It becomes easy to lose track of which version is which. That is one reason why using the document management features of a product like Privia is better than using email to transfer files. If everybody checks files in and out of the same repository, it's easy to make sure that the correct version is being used.
Email noise and the moment of need
Another problem with email is that it is easy to ignore and for messages to get lost in all the other email received. Your proposal-related email is competing for the contributor's attention. It's not unusual to send someone information about a proposal, only to have it "lost" in the user's email system and impossible to find when needed. You must make it easy to find files and information at the moment of need. A platform like Privia gives you one central place to put everything related to the proposal, keeping it well organized and easy to access.
Getting answers to questions
One of the more frequent reasons why authors don't complete their assignments as expected is that they run into a question for which they don't have an answer. In a face-to-face environment, people can just ask. But when you are alone in your office with no one located in the same time zone, a question you can't answer may keep you from completing your assignment. Or, it may provide you with an incentive to water down your contribution so that the question goes away. Privia has a feature that lets you see when other people are online and working on the proposal to send them an instant message. If you have a question, you can see who is online, ask the question, get the answer and move on. Believe it or not, this simple-sounding feature can keep your proposal from getting off-track.
Monitoring
How do you know what people are doing when you can't see them? You need to know when people have started working on an assignment so you can measure their progress. With Privia, you can:
- See when people are logged in
- Ask questions and associate them with a specific document
- Look at the current state of their files without disrupting their work
- Track the completion of assignments
- Know when an activity is at risk
- Provide documented, archived and searchable feedback
Review and validation
Conducting an effective review process is painful in the physical world. Doing it in the virtual world is even more so. Do you email the proposal files to the reviewer? How do you get comments back? How do reviewers participate in the debrief meeting? In addition you need to support more than just the formal "Red Team" review. When you are working remotely, you need a way to support all of the informal reviews and progress checks that are normally done and critical to success.
Privia provides an online review feature that captures and consolidates comments by multiple reviewers. It can be used in real time to conduct a formal review session, or it can also be used to provide informal feedback to authors when you check on their progress.
Conclusion
It is possible to successfully develop a proposal with remote participants. You must think through the issues ahead of time and have the right tools and management practices in place. If you don't prepare in advance, you are just asking for trouble.
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