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How to Get Ready for an RFP Using Privia
Most companies are not well prepared for the RFP when it finally hits the street. This is true even when they know in advance that the RFP is coming. This is a problem that can be solved with information management. Often much of what a company knows about the customer, opportunity, and competitive environment, fails to makes it into the proposal document. Usually, the problem is that the contributors can't access the organization's information when they need it. Essentially, they don't know how much they actually know.
The right tool can help you manage the flow of information as it is gathered and assessed, to help ensure that it gets to the right people at the right time. This way, time and effort invested gathering intelligence is not lost and corporate knowledge is properly reflected in the proposal. Since I have been playing around a lot with Privia, a proposal and opportunity management software package from Synchris, I am going to use it as an example.
There are several things you need to do in order to prepare for a bid:
- Collect information. You need to understand the customer, the opportunity, and the competitive environment.
- Establish a repository. You need a place to put information that is accessible to your team.
- Gather and prepare resources. You need to identify what resources you will need, including people and materials, in order to pursue the bid.
- Track progress and action items. You need to make sure that all activities are identified and in progress, and that everyone involved is on schedule.
- Make informed decisions. Periodically during the life of the opportunity, the company will qualify and re-qualify it to decide whether to pursue a bid and how much to invest in the effort.
Traditionally people have created documents, such as Capture Plans or Bid/No Bid presentations, which act as containers for the information they have collected. This approach does not work well because it is difficult to keep the information up to date and the information collected doesn't usually fit the format of a single document or presentation. If the template does not provide a placeholder for certain information, it can get lost, translating into wasted efforts and resources.
You can store information in folders on your network, but this can lead to a multitude of issues. It is not always clear which documents have which information. Multiple versions of the same document can be stored, with no way to know which is the "final" version or who made which changes and when. And, confidentiality and corporate intelligence can be compromised with open access on a network
With Privia, you can store information in several ways that make access and control easier to manage. The opportunity's profile (name, customer, value, etc.) is stored in structured fields that can be used for preparing pipeline reports. Documents collected can be stored in folders, with convenient control over who has access to them, and version control to keep track of revisions made to the information. Privia also provides the ability to search documents and other information (such as associated discussion threads or instant messages), making it easier to find the "nuggets hidden within." And because Privia acts as both a lead tracking tool and a proposal development tool, it facilitates accumulating information in a way that makes it accessible during the proposal development process. In other words, there is continuous flow of information from the moment the opportunity is identified until the final decision to bid is made and the final proposal document is turned in. Privia is a full bid and proposal lifecycle solution.
Privia really shows the value of information management tools in its workflow and assignment tracking features. You can break down the action items required to prepare for an RFP release and assign them to team members as tasks. Privia not only tracks the progress of the assignments, but also allows you to route files through the process. Instead of a Capture Plan sitting on someone's desk or resting in an email Inbox, it can be proactively routed for review with a copy ultimately delivered to the Proposal Manager. Everyone who looks at it will automatically see the most recent version. Instead of one or two key documents, you can break things down to facilitate access (Relevant Past Performance, Proposal Budget Notes, Competitive Assessments, Pricing Models, Teaming Agreements, etc.). Requests for information, like relevant past performance, can be routed through appropriate project managers and then be sent to the Proposal Department for lookup in a centralized database (which can also be stored in Privia).
The advantage to using a tool like Privia is that you get better tracking of progress and action items. You can track what progress is being made and see information as it accumulates. Information can be routed to all stakeholders, carried forward, built upon, and ultimately used. All information that comes into the system is searchable, so that you can find it. Decisions become smarter because you can actually see what you know and not have to take someone's word for it during a 15 minute presentation. And if you want to know whether your company is prepared for RFP release or not, all you have to do is look at the Gantt Chart that Privia automatically generates from the assignments, showing you what tasks have or have not been completed in real time.
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