When I look at the site statistics for this blog, I can see the words that people have searched on that have brought them to my site. Quite a few people seem to be looking for information on developing proposal outlines. I wrote a previous blog entry on The Importance of an Outline, and thought I would expand a bit on the process. It's good timing, because today I have to develop such an outline for one of my clients.
So here I am with a 35-page RFP, which is rather short by government standards because it is actually a task order which has been issued under an existing contract. As a result, it does not contain all of the boilerplate forms and other contractual stuff that usually accompanies an RFP. But what it does contain are the essential sections that I need to prepare an outline for the Technical Proposal -- (1) the scope-of-work; (2) the instructions; and (3) the evaluation criteria. In most instances, these are all you need to construct the first draft of your outline.
Where to begin? I always start with Section L -- Instructions to Offerors. In this case, the instructions tell me that the technical proposal is limited to 45 pages using a Times Roman 12 point font. The instructions also provide a list of 10 bulleted items that are to be addressed somewhere in the proposal. But there's no real order to these items, so I don't know what to do with them. I need more information.
So I turn next to Section M -- the Evaluation Criteria. Lo and behold, they've divided the evaluation criteria into three sections:
- Key Personnel
- Technical Approach and Methodology
- Past Performance
So I've got my three major proposal sections and a bunch of bulleted items from both Section L and Section M. I go back to the bulleted list in Section L. I look at each item in the list, determine what outline section it relates to, and copy and paste it into to the appropriate section of the outline document. I do the same with the listed items in Section M. My new outline now has some possible subsections, but they are not necessarily in the right order and some of the items may eventually end up being subsections of the subsections. Thus, my next task is to look at each of the three sections and make some preliminary decisions about how the items under them might logically be ordered. I end up with something like this for each of my 3 sections:
1. KEY PERSONNEL
A. Subheading (1) -- from an item in Section L
B. Subheading (2) -- from another item in Section L
C. Subheading (3) -- from an item in Section M
Now comes the harder part: incorporating information from the scope-of-work (Section C) into the outline. More on this tomorrow.
Leave a comment