In one line: A proposal is a sales document. It must be fully compliant with the solicitation, easy for an evaluator to score, and must tie every feature to a benefit the customer cares about, with proof.
Core idea
Government customers ask for work through several kinds of solicitation:
- a request for information (RFI) to survey what’s possible
- a request for proposals (RFP) or request for quotes (RFQ) for a defined need
- a broad agency announcement (BAA) that invites research ideas across a wide area of interest
The BAA the course studies [1] shows a common two-step pattern. First comes a short, mandatory white paper, limited to five pages in that announcement. The agency reads it and either encourages or discourages a full proposal, which has a technical volume and a separate cost volume.
How it works
Know how you’ll be scored. Write to the evaluation criteria, in the solicitation’s own order and terms. In the course example, two factors rank highest and are of equal weight:
- technical merit: innovation, the soundness of the concept, awareness of the state of the art, understanding of the problem’s scope, and of its risks and how they will be handled
- mission relevance
Then, in descending order:
- the team’s capabilities, experience and past performance
- cost reasonableness, where evaluators expect the technical approach to justify the labor mix and hours
- small-business subcontracting
What makes a strong proposal. A widely used checklist from proposal consulting comes down to a few habits:
- Be completely compliant and responsive.
- Make it easy for a mixed panel of evaluators to read.
- Carry a clear win strategy throughout.
- Link each feature to a concrete benefit to the customer, and back every major claim with evidence.
- Explain how the work will be done, convincingly.
- Stay honest, so the relationship lasts whether you win or lose.
A six-week proposal plan, for a typical 45- to 90-day response window:
- Week 1: develop win themes and a storyboard, and build an outline that maps each solicitation requirement to a section.
- Weeks 2–3: write detailed storyboards per section, review them at the pink team, and start drafting the technical sections.
- Weeks 4–5: draft the cost volume, then hold the red team, a one-day review of the full draft with several days left for revisions.
- Week 6: a final compliance check, then submit, with a day in reserve.
The white paper itself is a compressed proposal:
- the operational capability offered and why it matters
- what is new compared with existing approaches
- the technical approach
- a rough order-of-magnitude cost and schedule
The innovation must be explicit. Submissions that don’t state their advance clearly are rejected.
In practice
The course reviews a real white paper for a multi-sensor detection system. It shows how much a few pages can carry when each paragraph answers an evaluator’s question. Two lessons apply far beyond government work. First, build a compliance matrix before writing a word: one row per requirement, with the section that answers it. Second, write the executive summary early, as the win strategy in miniature, rather than last.
Questions to ask yourself
- Could an evaluator find our answer to every requirement in under a minute?
- Which of our claims are backed by evidence, and which are only assertions?
- Does our cost volume follow logically from our technical approach?
Connections
- The process around it: New Business Development, Color Team Reviews.
- Its engine room: Work Breakdown Structure, Cost-Based Bidding. A one-slide cousin: Quad Charts.
- Practiced in: Engineering Leadership Challenge Project.
- Capabilities exercised: Communicating and Advocacy, Responsibility and Urgency to Deliver, Resourcefulness.
Sources
- DHS S&T (2011) Long Range Broad Agency Announcement 11-03 [1]
- Course lecture on the pursuit of new business, with an example white paper and proposal; no public source.