Are Proposal Specialists Crazy or Just Different?
By Jim Russell
October 2006

I think that proposal specialists are among the most remarkable people you will ever meet. Some say they are crazy. I say they may be different but they are dedicated and indispensable. You have probably met some and maybe you were even forced to work with a few of them. You probably wondered who in their right mind would choose to work day-after-day in a high-pressure proposal factory characterized by tight deadlines, tough competition and anxious co-workers. Well, whether or not proposal specialists are in their right mind, we all should be thankful for them. I know we were always grateful for them at SAIC.

Many of these proposal specialists work in corporate proposal centers. If you get within 100 feet of one of these centers, you likely will hear screams of anger or frustration at one of the myriad things gone wrong on a proposal. None of these screams, however, come from proposal specialists. The specialists remain amazingly calm but often the people they are helping do not. The long-term proposal specialists seem to develop a release valve like a teakettle that relieves pressure before the lid blows. Come to think of it, some of the specialists do look a little funny. The nearest comparable activities to proposals I can think of are hand-to-hand combat, medical emergencies, and firefighting. They all require dedicated, tough and talented people who can deliver under pressure.

In my early days at SAIC over 30 years ago, most of the proposal efforts were based upon sole-source procurements wherein the Principal Investigator of the proposed project simply wrote a few page proposal and was awarded a contract. Then things changed over the years. Some of you might remember how proposals were produced with IBM Selectric typewriters and hand-drawn graphics. Exacta knives were used to cut and paste in corrections. It's a wonder that proposals got out the door. But those were the good old days as they say.

Over the years, procurements became competitive rather than sole source. Requests for Proposals or RFPs grew in size by orders of magnitude. Projects being bid were much larger and complex. Requirements for corporate qualifications increased dramatically. Proposal pricing methods became arduous and difficult and projects shifted from cost plus to fixed price work.

Ordinary people could not handle these challenges by themselves and proposal specialists came to the rescue. At SAIC, Dr. Beyster directed that corporate proposal centers be established with professional proposal specialists. These specialists include proposal managers, coordinators, and pricing analysts along with personnel skilled in publication, corporate qualifications and methods and allocating RFP requirements to proposal outlines. Do you have any idea how hard it is to shred the various sections of a large RFP and allocate them to a proposal outline?? There is an interesting story behind every one of these specialists. Lew Taynton, for example, became famous for devising, implementing and codifying methods for creating a requirements driven outline from an RFP. It is not possible to overstate the importance of this achievement. Lou could develop a complex outline faster and better than a whole team of people and he showed others how to do it.

Roger, another specialist in the early proposal center was brilliant, opinionated, driven and dedicated but controversial. He said through clenched teeth "Being close doesn't count; there are only winners and losers". About half the people would not do a proposal unless he was involved but the other half wouldn't let him within 20 feet of their proposal. Roger is now in heaven where I am sure he is writing front gate systems proposals for St. Peter.

Rest assured that an interesting story lies behind every one of these specialists. Imagine the challenge of managing such creative people who definitely walked to a different beat. I have great admiration for people like Marta, Roger, Becky and Elody for their skills, perseverance and achievements in proposal management over such a long time.

In the early days of the SAIC proposal center over 20 years ago, I recall Dr. Beyster calling me early one morning to make a point about the center. He said "I drove by the proposal center last night at 9 PM and the lights were not on. What's going on?" It was just a pointed reminder that work in a proposal center should be going on night and day. It soon did.

I suspect that many of the laws made famous by such people as Murphy and Parkinson may have been derived from proposal efforts gone awry. Nearly everyone working on a proposal has encountered Murphy's laws. Examples include "If anything can go wrong, it will" and "Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse". I always chuckled at the derivative law that said the Murphy was an optimist.

Now, hundreds of supplements to Murphy's laws have been written and many derivatives of the laws have been written especially for proposals. These are derived from the experience of hard proposal knocks and some are codified in proprietary lessons learned documents. Some are good advice but others are not. In Red Teams, for example we found it was not helpful to tell and author that what he or she had written "was a piece of crap" Instead, it was better and more helpful to describe what was wrong and how to fix it. This is good advice.

One example of bad advice is one the laws that say's "Any attempt to apply reason and logic to RFP requirements is an exercise in futility". This may seem true and humorous but you better decipher or divine the RFP reasoning and logic if you want to be successful. You may have known proposal workers who were foolhardy enough to ignore the applicable laws. They did so at their own peril and the proposal pathway is strewn with their bodies. You may even have seen some as I did. It's not a pretty sight.

The volume and effort associated with proposals at companies like SAIC is simply staggering. About 10,000 proposals are now written each year at such companies. Many of these require thousands of pages and multiple submissions. So, if the average proposal were a mere 500 pages, the number written in a year would total 5,000,000 pages. Since we learned that a typical good proposal writer can only average four pages per day of usable material, this requires 1,250,000 person days of effort-or 625 person years of effort at 2,000 hours per year. Thus, proposal efforts are both huge, and arduous but they are the vital lifeline of a company.

Even more amazing is the ability to sustain win rates in the 60-70 percent range on such an enormous effort. Proposal specialists armed with good methods and reliable information from capture activities contribute a lot to these high wins rates. I hope some of these specialists are around to help the FED as it grows especially because they are interesting, fun and very special favorites of mine.

Jim

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