Pretend you are the client

Another one of  our blog posts, "How do you build winning proposals," talks about how color team reviews help teams progressively build a winning proposal with planned checkpoints.

A crucial element of building and reviewing the proposal from the customer's perspective is the creation of compliance checklists designed to make sure all the required pieces and parts are addressed.

In Federal RFPs, issued in accordance with Federal Acquisition Regulations, section M of the RFP provides the evaluation factors and will indicate whether the evaluation factors are of equal importance or whether some are significantly more important.  (side note:  they are either equally important or some are significantly more important.  There is no provision for simply "more important.")

All evaluation factors must be addressed and should be at the top of your checklist!  The checklist should be of sufficient detail that complex factors can be assessed for all their components.   

Beyond section M (evaluation factors), Section L provides important "proposal preparation instructions" and will most certainly include a list of topics to address, whether you need separate proposal volumes (or not), along with page count and typographic restrictions.  If you're lucky, the topics requested in section L and the evaluation factors in section M are in strong agreement.  Sometimes that's not the case (making proposal design more challenging).

Regardless, make sure your checklist includes all the things delineated in the proposal preparation instructions.

After M and L, it might be necessary to address specific or key Statement of Work sections (RFP section C), as that's where the "work to be performed" is documented.  Include that in your checklist.

There may also be RFP section H requirements that you need to acknowledge in writing.  Review these and put these in your checklist.

Proposal compliance checklists are usually built at two separate times by different people: 

1. Very early in the proposal design phase, when the proposal manager is working to establish a compliant response framework; and,
2. By the color team leads, who are pretending they are the customer.  They must ALWAYS build their checklist independently of the proposal design team.  Being independent provides another level of Quality Assurance check on whether the proposal is designed sufficiently to allow easy client evaluation

Regardless of whether you're just starting to formulate your proposal response, or acting as a color team lead doing quality assurance, build and review your proposal from the client perspective using a compliance checklist.

Need help building your compliance checklist for either of the above purposes?  Press the "Contact" link and let know you need some help.