Monday, amendment #4 to the Government’s Light Utility Helicopter (LUH) Request for Proposal (RFP) hits the street. It got me thinking about what this precipitates in every bidder’s organization. Proposals are due to the government on 12 Oct 05, so everyone's efforts are getting down to the "short strokes." For the contractors, each change serves as a speed bump in the proposal preparation process. The LUH Statement of Work will have to be reviewed for changes, as does each paragraph in the other sections of the RFP. After changes are identified they have to be analyzed as to their impact on the system being offered by the hopeful bidder. In conjunction with that analysis, the impacts in the proposal completed to date have to be reviewed, changed if required, and impacts on pricing computed. It is hard, detailed, grunt work and for companies an expensive effort.
A contractor proposal team on a big project can be a hundred or more people at times, but when you are heading a proposal effort, you always wish you could have just a couple more. Some companies maintain a core of cadre personnel dedicated to writing proposals. They task the functional groups in a company to provide manpower for their "functional" sections of the proposal. Others create a proposal team out of hide, meaning the direct charge work these folks do normally either doesn’t get gone, or is done after hours or on weekends when one is not writing a proposal. Some companies hire “proposal gunslingers” to come in and write the proposal for them. I have never been a big fan of this approach as it means a company can get signed up for Six Sigma or earned value programs they have never done before, but the gunslinger does a great job selling it to the customer. The biggest problem is that these “hired guns” never know the product as well as the company people and ultimately one gets a weaker product presentation than if they had proposal trained company personnel working the effort. I remember my one experience with "gunslingers." The proposal was awesome, flashy, and had all the right words. The only problem with it was that is was a lie. The company would never do all that was promised, it never had and to them, it was just "proposal fantasy" one had to generate to win. They won the contract, and the government never noticed the deception...which made one wonder whether the government really wanted all that in the first place or had just used one of it's infamous checklist/templates to create the RFP. When I generated RFPs on the government side, I quickly learned "data calls" were evil things. It took a lot of hard work to toss out the unessential things you didn't really need from the government personnel. After a while I required they provide a rationale for data requirement so I could understand it. After that, the "data calls" generated far fewer superfluous requirements. People too easily forgot that "data" cost the program money, and too often it went straight into a file drawer after the requirement was "checked off," never again to see the light of day.
One thing is common to proposal writing. You have to keep a sense of humor. It is often a high pressure time, and sometimes the fiction and reality start becoming the same in what you are writing. That is when it is time to step back and reboot what you are doing. John over at Castle Argghhh! is currently going through a proposal effort (not LUH though) and he pretty much confirms what everybody knows, writing proposals is always a lot harder than it could be and should be.
Use of computers, databases, spreadsheets, digital storyboards and computer graphics engines means changes today are much less disruptive than they were when I worked on my first paper based proposal in the early 1980s while working for a major defense contractor. Then, changes were feared and could cause expensive disruptions to schedule and your budget. Any change that meant you had to get new graphics or charts from the “graphics group” could put you a week or so behind. These folks were doing them on drafting tables or drawing them from scratch. Today, computers let you make the change in a matter of minutes. However the use of all this with their extensive databases and cost estimating algorithms come at a cost too. They force you to be more precise in your front end organization and planning before you start your proposal. If you short change your government proposal analysis or requirement identification before you set up your campaign plan and identify resource requirements you end up playing catch-up for the rest of the effort and the job becomes harder than it needs to be.
One thing that always amazed me is how many companies are unwilling (e.g. cheap) to make an investment in training their personnel to write winning proposals. When I worked for that major defense contractor, they invested in training, and the number of wins they got was their payoff. Bottom line is corporations that are worth a damn, invest in their people and their customer benefits. Sadly, that is sometimes viewed as a radical idea in some companies.
The last little company I worked with had some great people, but also a management that did not invest in their people. When the company attempted to do a proposal, it reminded me of a chicken pen at feeding time. Unless that company changes its approach, it will remain an “also ran” in every competitive proposal effort. Its management has never learned that no matter how great the product, so long as others can tell their story better in a proposal, they won’t win contracts. It is one of the reasons I left that company - I realized that I was not going to be able to impact the corporate culture there.
That is why as I look at the competitors in the LUH I know the winner of the competition will not necessarily be the best company, or the best aircraft. It will be the company that has made the investments required to sell its product in the unique proposal environment of the US Government. Fortunately, the better companies know this and generally it shows in their product and their proposals. But it remains a crap shoot. Sometimes the soldier gets the product most likely to meet the requirement. Sometimes they get a contractor who told the best story. That is why the job of the government is so tough. Sorting the “fly specks from the pepper” in a contractor proposal is an art form and success is dependent on how well the government defined and communicated the requirement.
Although I have never been a big fan of the LUH requirement, I have my fingers crossed that the aircraft the Army gets is the best one possible. Our aviation soldiers deserve nothing less.
