Proposal Checklists

Who likes checklists?  Me -- I love them. I use checklists all the time for my proposal work. They are really the only way you can stay organized and remember all the different things that need to be done. I use checklists for pretty much everything, and I make checklists for others to use as well. Here are some of the the checklists I find most useful.

• Overall Proposal Checklist. I created this checklist years ago and adapt it to many of the proposals I work on. It's a great starting place.



• Personnel Checklist. If you're including more than just a few personnel in your proposal, you can use a checklist to keep track of all the personnel-related items that need to be gathered or completed for each individual -- resume, letter of commitment, blurb, salary and other cost-related information, etc.



• Subcontractor Checklist. I often work on proposals involving several subcontractors and need to keep track of all the information that they are supposed to submit to the prime contractor -- resumes and other personnel information, capability statements, cost proposals, institutional letters of commitment, required forms, and other proposal-specific info.



• Assignment Checklist. I use this to keep apprised of who is responsible for what section(s) of a proposal, how far along it is, and when it is due. 

Right now, I'm working with a client to make revisions to a previously-submitted proposal and respond to questions posed by the government. To do this, we need to go through and make necessary changes to the qualifications and resumes that were previouly submitted for perhaps 50 or so people. It's a very tedious task. So I created a checklist/matrix for my client that contains all the categories of personnel and the specific qualifications that each individual is required to possess. It won't make the task any less tedious, but it will make it a lot easier. 

I can't imagine doing a proposal without checklists.