Creating your own draft RFP allows you to address the following key questions: 1.How extensive will the scope of work be? 2. Will there be a past performance review? 3. Will it be a "best value" procurement or a price shoot-out? 4. What will be the most important evaluation considerations? When customers [...]
The first step in the proposal writing process after receipt of the RFP is a detailed analysis of the RFP and "decomposition" of the RFP into a comprehensive proposal - solicitation compliance matrix.
The “pipeline” provides a means of classifying opportunities through stages until they are awarded. A pipeline answers the question, "How many opportunities do I have to pursue in order to win a certain amount of business?"
Those who didn’t attend the Wednesday, July 15, meeting of the National Capital Area APMP in Falls Church, Virginia missed a best-of-the-best panel discussion on finding and managing teaming partners. Panelists included:
How can a company best use ‘price-to-win’ (PTW) analysis to help win government contracts? Imagine you are a CMMI Level 3 IT company bidding a service opportunity. You learn there will be four competitors, and they are all CMMI Level 4 or 5. Would you still bid? Or, what if you were bidding a services contract and learned that the Government had already performed an analysis of all contractors’ rates by labor category and indirect rate structures and intended to use this to determine the reasonableness of bids received? Would this impact your labor rates or labor mix?
During the nine months since October, we have seen the most abnormal market for proposal services in living memory. The paradigm of higher budgets every year is now a thing of the past. Instead, we are looking at nine more lean years as the debt is paid down. And even if the politicians should reach a “grand bargain”, the budgets for the “discretionary spending” that generates RFPs will likely continue to be lower rather than higher each succeeding year.
How many times have all of us had to throw an RFI response together in 1/5th the time needed? On May 15, 2013 the National Capital Area (NCA) chapter of the APMP presented a panel discussion on RFI's. The panelists contributed valuable insights helpful even to seasoned professionals.
Panel members included Patrick Breen from GSA FedSim, Lenise Lago from the U.S. Forest Service, and Olessia Smotrova-Taylor, the current president of the NCA chapter of APMP and OST Global Solutions.
Now that the appropriations have been passed for about 6 weeks, the period of fast proposal activity / business is coming soon. Most agencies have realigned their plans IAW their appropriations, and RFP releases are beginning to increase.
With less than 5 months left in FY 2013, proposal business will likely be fast by late May. And it should continue to be relatively fast during the rest of the fiscal year. This is because the volume of procurements pushed to the right exceeds the negative effects of the sequestration. And agency procurement offices need to process as many of the postponed bids as their bandwidth will permit before end of fiscal year.
I am a LPTA consumer. My drink of choice is caffeine-free Diet Coke, when I shop the "lowest price" I can normally buy a 64 ounce bottle with prices of between ninety-nine cents and $1.99. Some large box grocery stores use a pricing technique of buy 4 for a price of $5. They make us do math and make us think you have to buy in volume to get the $1.25 price which is mostly never true.
On Tuesday, March 26, the president signed a continuing resolution (CR) that provides definitive appropriations for all federal agencies for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2013. It matters not so much that this CR retains the full $85 billion sequestration. What matters most is that all the federal agencies and military services now have their appropriations in hand.
Now that the agencies and services know the exact amount of dollars they have to spend, the period of confusion and indecision is over. Procurement personnel, from the contract specialists to the assistant secretary level, can now move forward with confidence. As a result, proposal activity should begin to flow at a rate approaching normal speed for the season.
