Proposal Reviews — Can We Make Them Better, Faster, and Less Prone to Going Off the Rails?

Proposal reviews are the bane of most bid managers’ lives. The stress factor ratchets up exponentially when you have multiple people involved, spread across multiple sites in multiple time zones. And that assumes you are just making one submission! Combine dozens of version changes with deadline pressure and you have a recipe for mistakes, frustration and a process that gets harder to manage by the minute.

I recently came across a terrific article on the topic of proposal reviews by American proposal specialist Joe Latta, who has clearly given this issue a great deal of thought.

Joe shows how we can leverage technology to make the process better, faster and less prone to going off the rails. His article centres around the capabilities of Adobe Acrobat products, including how to annotate comments in PDF; export comments to Word; keep track of everything in SharePoint; and use new features of Acrobat such as EchoSign to get electronic signatures on PDF documents.

There are some great tools and techniques in Joe's article for anyone who manages complex bids.

Evidence-based Bid Pricing webinar

This month I talked to Greg Eyres of InforValue about how organisations can derive more profit from customer contracts through a smarter approach to bid pricing. The resulting webinar on Evidence-based Bid Pricing is now available to view in Greg’s Resource Centre.

Greg is one of only a handful of specialists in the world that practice in the area of Tender Pricing and his work has dramatically influenced the bid success of some of the largest companies in the world, including Motorola, CSC and IBM. Greg has also developed a number of patents in this space and his articles on tender pricing have been published in industry publications including Informs Journal, Frontiers in Services and Shortlist. Recently, Greg developed KPrice - the world’s only evidence-based pricing tool suite designed specifically for tendering. A Chartered Accountant by training, Greg now consults on Tender Pricing issues around the Asia-Pacific region.

In this webinar, Greg shares a number of interesting case studies that demonstrate the dramatic effect of evidence-based bid pricing on the success of pursuits. For example, Greg and his team were once able to convince the client to increase their $60 million budget by 25%, due to the weight of evidence they had acquired about the true cost of providing the service.

Spitball June podcast: the changing face of productivity

We all want to be productive, but is technology making it easier or just adding to the load? In this month’s podcast we discuss productivity; what holds us back from being productive, our experiences with technology and tips on Apps we’ve tried, the traps of traditional time management wisdom, “infobesity” and the all-you-can-eat buffet, dragons and punching fear in the face!

Listen in at http://spitballbiz.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/productivity-and-technology/

Books we recommend this month include The New Rules of Management: How to Revolutionise Productivity, Innovation and Engagement by Implementing Projects that Matter (by Peter Cook) and Start: Punch Fear in The Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters (by Jon Acuff).