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PM Proposals Consulting CC |
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Getting it right before it goes wrong |
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Why Utilise a Third Party to Bolster Initial Bid Preparation?
A. Sales / Proposals vs Operations Integration.
It is common practice for medium to large size organizations to develop separate sales / proposals departments to concentrate on procurement of new projects. This is reasonably justified by senior management to allow scarce operations staff to concentrate on execution of running projects and sales / proposals staff to ensure continuity of work for the organization. An unfortunate common effect of such a structure is that the individual departments are effectively working to different short term goals. Sales / proposals department are often incentivized based on orders obtained, which leads to an “order at any cost” culture in these departments. On the other hand, operations are measured against delivery of the project against the contractual scope, cost, time and quality – reflected in the final financial result of the project. This problem is supposedly overcome by the organization having a formal handover procedure with consensus on the project deliverables and associated cost being reached at conclusion of handover.
The reality is often that the handover from sales / proposals to operations is done after the order from the client has been accepted by the organization. The internal handover between departments then invariably degrades to an exercise where sales / proposals attempt to paint a rosy picture of the project, while operations frantically try to expose the deficiencies in the bid presented to the client. To compound the problem, it is often common for sales / proposals to have prepared the bid only with documentation requested from the client, with no documentation in place to allow the operations staff to quickly and effectively evaluate and agree on the deliverables and pricing allowed. Preparation of the initial bid, inclusive of documentation commonly utilised by project managers, forces closer alignment between these departments and will significantly reduce the conflict and time taken at this stage of the project.
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