Last week, while working on the proposal for my European client, my colleagues and I ran out of time. We had to e-mail the entire proposal to the client, and timewise, he was 6 hours ahead of our time here on the east coast.
We had prepared a draft Executive Summary, which was required by the RFA but didn't have any evaluation points attached to it. So due to the time constraints, we agreed that we would have to do a "Cut-and- Paste Executive Summary." Normally, this is something that I don't like to do, and I particularly don't recommend it for Executive Summaries that are going to be evaluated and scored. But desperate situations call for desperate measures, and in this case the Executive Summary wasn't going to be scored.
A cut-and-paste Executive Summary is just that: instead of writing it from scratch, you select appropriate paragraphs from the proposal and cut and paste them into the Executive Summary. For this proposal, I took some summary paragraphs out of each major section of the proposal: technical approach, personnel, management plan, and past performance and capabilities. Voila -- an Executive Summary! It certainly wasn't what we would have wanted to write if we had the time, but it was decent and no one could say we didn't have one.
Time, time, time -- the bane of most proposals!
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