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Two For The Price Of One: Use Your Proposal Software For Project ManagementAlmost every professional service bid can increase the value-added offered to the customer by including a web-based project management portal. A web-based project portal can offer access control, search and retrieval, knowledge management, improved efficiencies, better oversight, and more to the project team and to the customer. Finding and installing such a web-based project management solution, however, often causes professional service firms much pain. Coincidently, many companies suffer similar pains when searching for and installing a proposal software solution. Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could make one selection and solve both problems? As it turns out, the needs of proposals and the needs of projects have a lot of similarities:
The key to making a selection is to look for proposal software that is not exclusively built around a proposal workflow. You could also look for a project or document management platform that could support the proposal process, but the proposal process has particular requirements that a generic platform probably won't support. One platform that we know of that could do double-duty is Privia® by Synchris®. Privia is a web-based document management, collaboration and workflow platform designed to help manage the entire bid lifecycle, from opportunity tracking to proposal development by distributed teams. Privia's workflow system is very powerful and can easily serve the needs of most projects. Here are just two examples of how Privia can support both proposal development and project management: Example #1: Task Order Contract. Prime contractors with task order contracts often have large numbers of subcontractors. Coordinating which subcontractors are going to participate on which task orders and responding to task orders is a challenge for which a web-based portal is particularly well suited. Each task order may spawn a new project, often at different locations. A flexible web-based proposal platform can be used to win the master contract, provide a means to coordinate responses to task orders, and give the prime contractor a tool that facilitates coordination and oversight of multiple task order and project teams. Two For The Price Of One If you are going to pay for proposal software, it may only be a relatively small incremental cost to add seats for the project team. You are, in effect, getting two solutions for one price. When you consider the costs of training and installation, you gain even more due to economies of scale. Your project lead and key staff will probably be involved in the proposal, already have the software installed and be familiar with it when the project starts. If you use the same proposal software for all of your proposals, and all of your projects, then you really start to see economies of scale. When everyone has it and knows how to use it collaboration on any project within your company benefits. Proposal software is an overhead expense that is difficult for many professional services companies to absorb. But a project expense, either direct or indirect, is much easier to approve. When you use one platform for both, it may be easier to account for and recover the cost of the software.
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