About Proposals

The key to sustainment and growth for any enterprise is the ability to win or capture new business. The Program and Contract Management app provides the business with the ability to receive customer Requests for Proposal and develop, review, and submit responsive proposal responses with a high degree of assurance that all customer requirements have been addressed and that the manner in which the proposal response was developed is consistent with corporate requirements as defined within policies and procedures. Proposals are used to capture the customer’s requirements defined within a Request for Proposal (RFP) and to assign activities to proposal members required to develop the proposal response.

As a type of project, the proposal defines the schedule tasks to complete the proposal, a proposal manager, proposal team members, and all ground rules and assumptions related to the proposal. Proposals can also include the customer RFP documents and any correspondence between the customer and respondents and the development of proposal products. Proposals can be associated to a program to identify new business opportunities or against a contract to define proposed changes to the contract.

Additionally, proposal templates allow the reference tasks and bookmarks to collect artifacts, such as Basis of Estimate (BOE) worksheets, proposal volumes, certifications and statements, to allow a common and consistent methodology for proposals developed by an organization.

Proposals include the ability to identify and manage internal and external correspondence related to the proposal effort, to manage issues that may arise in the development of the proposal, to identify any revisions to the proposal definition and associated artifacts, and to identify and mitigate proposal risks.

A distinction exists between a proposal schedule and a proposed schedule. A proposal schedule contains the tasks and activities required to develop, review, and submit a proposal. A proposed schedule is a preliminary schedule that reflects tasks and activities required to execute the contract if it is awarded.

After creating the proposal and defining the members of the proposal team, the plan for developing the proposal schedule can be defined. The method for creating the proposal schedule is dependent on how the proposal was created. Was the proposal created from a template or copied from another proposal? Secondary to that is the method of creating and editing tasks and milestones in the proposal schedule that can be done in MS Project or directly from the Schedule/Tasks.

If the proposal was created from a template and that template contained a list of tasks and deliverables, then an initial proposal schedule will have been created at the time of creating the proposal. If the proposal was created by copying from another proposal and that project contained a list of tasks and deliverables, then the schedule from that project will have carried over into the new project as a preliminary schedule. In either of these cases, the schedule will most likely require editing.