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.