Challenge: The client is a successful global defence firm that faced the opportunity to bid on the largest project in the company’s history. They had been working on pursuing the project for five years, and the time came to put together a major proposal worth $100s of millions; a winner-take-all opportunity for which the winner would become the dominant player in the global market.
Intervention: We developed a proposal plan to enable the company to develop a bid, using their own internal expertise as well as external help. The plan included:
– Bid team organization and responsibilities
– Decision gates and reviews
– Customer interface strategy
– Issues management
– Competitor analysis
– Bid structure
– Win themes
– Risk management
– Proposal review, assembly and delivery.
Where expertise was not available in the company, we brought in and managed additional external help. The proposal plan was executed. During the final reviews, we identified weak areas. To address this we put in place quick-hit expert resources.
Result: The proposal, amounting in the thousands of pages for a single copy, was submitted to the customer. The client believes that it was the best proposal they could possibly have produced for this project.