I met with my recompete #3 client yesterday to discuss how we are going to proceed with this bid. Recompete #3 is a fairly large and specialized government contract (in the hundreds of millions) that my client has held for many years. I've worked on every one of the proposals for this particular contract so I'm pretty familiar with it. In our first planning meeting yesterday we discussed a few issues that we are going to have to deal with fairly quickly.
- How much material can we recycle? The RFP for this bid is very similar to the RFP that we responded to five years ago. There are some differences, but on the whole they are very much alike. This was not the case with past RFPs for this same project, which differed extensively each time. So some of the questions we are asking ourselves are: How much of the previous proposal can we recycle? Can we re-use entire sections or just paragraphs here and there? Should we focus on paraphrasing as opposed to just lifting pieces verbatim?
- My client will be required to subcontract a substantial amount of work to small businesses. The small businesses that have been working on the current contract have become large and are no longer eligible to participate. So the following questions now arise: How can the project be divided up into discrete chunks that could be handled by various small business subcontractors? How many small businesses should be part of the bid? What will these small businesses be responsible for?
- Finally, of course, there are the issues relating to proposal preparation. Who will be responsible for preparing each section of the technical proposal? How best to communicate and coordinate with those who will be working on the business proposal? Who will coordinate with the selected small business subcontractors and what specific role will they play in preparing the proposal?
Just a few of the typical questions that need to be addressed during the proposal planning stage.
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