The Right Stuff

When you are faced with a daunting number of RFP opportunities, it can sometimes seem as if your best hope is to simply keep up. After all, if you are submitting high-quality proposals by the deadline for all the opportunities that fit your company’s capabilities and business strategy, that’s success, right?

You may have your head above water, but you are most likely exhausted. And if you maintain the same pace, what is going to happen next year? And the year after that, when the waves of RFPs come bigger and faster, what then?

Meeting Today’s Needs While Preparing for Tomorrow

While you are responding to the RFPs in front of you—maintaining or improving your win rate—you must also prepare for the expected greater numbers of RFPs that will come in the future, which will likely increase in their complexity and technological sophistication. To do so, you need to build your proposal department’s response capability by evaluating your team, technology, and processes.

Here are some steps you can take:

• Using APMP best practices, find both theoretical and applied techniques and methodologies to get you moving in the right direction.
• Work with industry providers to identify technologies and tools that you can implement to get your team to the next level of proposal capabilities.
• Onboard new team members who fit your department’s needs today and your anticipated needs in the future.
• Enlist the support of senior management, sharing the potential advantages of the departmental changes regarding increased opportunities and wins.

While you are responding to the RFPs in front of you—maintaining or improving your win rate—you must also prepare for the expected greater numbers of RFPs that will come in the future.

Case Example: Scientific Games

The global proposals team at Scientific Games took on the challenge to build a new team that would meet the organization’s future needs. The team quickly discovered that there were two critically important areas that needed clear and determined focus: people and technology. Intrinsically intertwined in today’s proposal department structure, these two areas should be addressed together for the best chance of success.

The team focused on inquiry and discovery when developing an opportunity management life cycle process. The process is continuously tweaked based on suggestions from global proposal team members who live the process daily—the opportunity director, managers, coordinators, writers, and production team members.

Discovery and Strategic Approach

1. Evaluate existing capability, tools, and processes. In 2010, the Scientific Games team completed a survey of its ISO-based proposal process and looked at the tools that existed in the department. The survey compared the capabilities of the department’s team members with its needs using a process engineering review approach and how those capabilities fit with long- and short-term goals.
2. Select next steps. The team determined what actions were necessary to support its goals (e.g., win rate, proposal volume, and the ability to handle the growing complexity of RFPs).
   • Redesigned the process to incorporate APMP best practices and focus on key proposal response events—kick-off, Pink Teams, Red Teams, quality reviews, production reviews—to improve overall response quality.
   • Hired new proposal managers who are certified as APMP Foundation-level (or better), or who could quickly achieve APMP certification, to handle the increased volume and complexity of upcoming RFPs (2011–2015).
   • Implemented a quality initiative, with a proposal quality manager who leads training or quality programs with proposal managers and production teams.
3. Identify best practices. The team researched vendor solutions and industry best practices and found APMP an important repository of experiences of thousands of industry professionals. Team members attended annual and regional conferences that put vendors, presenters, and users all in close proximity. During this stage, the team:
   • Sourced a vendor system for proposal database management that would best fit its proposal content management needs.
   • Found new ways to integrate international and virtual teams needed to respond to bid opportunities from 2011 to 2015.
   • Identified collaboration tools to facilitate real-time edits and content updates.
   • Eliminated paper-based procedures, adopting fully electronic proposal content generation, collaboration, and production.
   • Moved from a proprietary bid production platform to a more efficient platform that allowed for more collaboration and proposal development time.
4. Get organized. The team then focused on improving its tracking of RFPs—by business unit and by location.
   • Established a sales logging tool that captured expected RFPs for each business unit with key metrics to allow for bid/no-bid decision making.
   • Centralized domestic and international opportunity reporting organized by business unit, to help determine RFP volume and team requirements.
   • Developed an opportunity plan of upcoming RFPs, establishing a timeline (24 to 36 months) for expected RFPs and tracking with sales teams worldwide.

Implementation, Evaluation, and Continuous Improvement

Finally, the Scientific Games global proposals team implemented the solutions and procedures it had identified as delivering the highest guarantee of success. Carefully selected new team members were brought on board and developed internally. After implementing off-the-shelf tools and programs, the team integrated custom applications and created new reporting to better engage the business teams and senior management in the company’s RFP success.

As soon as anything new was implemented, the entire team was asked for suggestions for expansion or improvement. Feedback was critical to reinforce good choices and to quickly adjust some processes to better meet the diverse needs of the users and business teams.

The team measures its success based on the following results.

• Over the past three years, bid response efficiency has increased while response time has decreased.
• Morale has increased among proposal team members, business teams, and subject matter experts engaged in generating proposal responses.

Three surveys have confirmed that the team is headed in the right direction and has accomplished many of the goals it set out to achieve. Impromptu mini surveys and reports continue to provide real-time input into the team’s journey. Senior management has recognized the improved process and increased focus in advance of

RFPs and appreciates the more advanced opportunity management process in place today.

Key Learnings

The Good

• People come first. Invest in their training and support; maintain flexibility.
  • There is usually not just one right answer (tool or process) but also a combination of many.
  • A change in corporate culture is not possible without the support of senior management.

The Bad

• The amount of energy needed to implement change can be surprising at times.
• Expect learning curves, especially with technology.
• Change is hard. There is often resistance at the beginning: “What is wrong with the way we were doing it?” Be persistent.
• Demonstrating the value is key to quickly gaining buy-in from upper management.

The Ugly

• The first 90 percent of change is easier than the last 10 percent. It is like losing that last 5 pounds.

While this is a challenging process, immense satisfaction comes from aligning the technology and people on your team to better meet the challenges of the proposal effort for the coming year and many years in the future. Winning RFPs and obtaining new contracts that allow your company to secure everyone’s future is a very valuable contribution that your new proposals team can make.

Scientific Games is a leading developer of technology-based products and services and associated content for worldwide gaming, lottery, and interactive markets. Frank Candido, senior director of global proposals, leads a team of professionals in pursuit of complex B2G and B2B opportunities globally. Colleen Allen, director of opportunity management, collaborates with business teams across the company in pursuit of opportunities in the long-range business pipeline. They can be contacted at frank.candido@scientificgames.com or colleen.allen@scientificgames.com.