A while back, I wrote an article arguing for consistency in proposals as a way to signal the quality of your work. Few will have disagreed with the sentiment, but how do you do it? Here are five practical tips on how to get there.

Before I dive into this, let me answer a question why this is a task at all. Your first instinct might be an obvious: “Duuhhh.” Of course it is important. Doesn’t everyone tell you to spell check your resume? How would anyone be so sloppy when tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake? 

As someone who has managed and coached teams on many proposals for 500 to 1,000 millions (!!!), there is a single reason for this “sloppiness:” Size. The size of the document you are expected to deliver and the size of your technical team that contributes to the document. In a typical two-step competition, you first deliver a document of 100 to 200 pages for a down-select. Should you be lucky and good  enough to make it to the next phase, you are asked to deliver a 1,200 to 1,600 page long report on a twelve-month concept study. Given the time pressure, 12 months go by faster than you think, much of the work often goes on while you are developing the report. Now consider that you have between 20 and 30 writers on you report, and you may start to see the problem. What should you do about it?

Back in 1982, good old Edwards Deming described a way out of the crisis for the American automobile industry. Back then, U.S. manufacturers were losing in quality against their Japanese competitors. Although the domestic brands spent a lot of time inspecting their cars and fixing production errors at the end of the assembly line, they could never catch up. They were trying to “inspect quality in” by checking and then repairing their work. Whereas Japanese manufacturers perfected the art of “building quality in” by ensuring every step of the manufacturing process was done with great care and accuracy. The quote below illustrates the culture present at the time that supported this. 

Heard in a seminar. One gets a good rating for fighting fire. The result is visible; can be qualified. If you do it right the first time, you are invisible. You satisfied the requirement. That’s your job. Mess it up, and correct it later, you become a hero. 
W. Edwards Deming in “Out of the Crisis”

So my first advice is to build quality in, instead of trying to fix your mistakes later. Give yourself the best chance for a good product by delaying the report writing. As long as you are still working out what is supposed to go into the report because you are still doing the work, you cannot describe it accurately. Next you need a solid and consistent base. In screenwriting for tv-shows this is called a “bible.” It is a reference document used by screen writers for information on characters, settings and other elements of a television, film, or video game project. In traditional proposal writing, we used to call it the “wall of truth.” The wall referred to a spot in the proposal room (yes, we all used to work in the same room together) that held all the essential information about the project. 

Sadly, I have never worked on a team that achieved consistency through the above bottoms-up approach alone. I always had to resort to some sort of inspection method to fix the remaining issues. Welcome to the horizontal review process. If you think of a large proposal document as a crossword puzzle, this may become more clear. Large documents are written vertically or down. You bring in a thermal engineer to describe your thermal management approach and they write just that section. Accurately, competently, and with great attention to details. Evaluators, however, read a proposal horizontally, or across. They, with exceptions, don’t doubt you can solve an isolated issue, but really want to see how it all hangs together. They want to see that all the items and activities your thermal engineer is describing are capture in the parts lists, budget estimates, and the schedule. Have you allowed for enough lead time to order all parts? Will they be available when needed or will they hold up the rest of the project? Do you have enough schedule and budget reserves to account for the expected delays and the unexpected ones? This gets complicated real fast.

Here may be the time to include a warning against, with the best intentions, putting on a production of “review theater.” I believe I coined the term in analogy to the “security theater” we may encounter at airports. Review theater is very seductive. It makes reviewers feel good because they will find many instances of inconsistencies and feel they have done their job. It also makes teams feel good because now an independent group has reviewed the document and they have a limited list of actions to complete. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly rare that a single review will find all inconsistencies. And even if they did, by definition any review draft is not the final document and there is no guarantee that further revisions won’t introduce new errors. A major risk of last-minute, high-priority revisions is the introduction of horizontal integration errors that nobody anticipated and you are now out of time to find let alone correct. 

This warning isn’t meant to discourage you from the reviewing your document. Meaningful reviews can unearth important issues. The key to running an effective review is to approach the document like an evaluator would. They are usually subject matter experts and will look for areas that touch on their expertise. A way of emulating this is to identify threads that run through your document. Popular threads can run along key performance parameters such as mass, cost, schedule. But don’t forget your performance, cost, and schedule margins, systems engineering and cost control. The key difference between effective horizontal reviews and review theater is that the former requires a significant and sustained effort. Don’t just work up a sweat once and call it a day. You will likely need to have a small team of individuals not distracted by other tasks, work in parallel with your team. I didn’t promise that this was going to be easy. 

Finally, it is always good practice to keep each section of a proposal focused on the topic that is asked for in the evaluation guidelines. Work with your writers to discourage them to make broad statement about the entire projects. These are simply too likely to be in conflict with the broad statement of another writer. If it isn’t asked for, don’t be tempted to offer it. Answer the questions and leave it at that.

So here are my five steps to a self-consistent proposal: (1) delay writing as long as possible to start from a stable baseline, (2) use a wall of truth to keep your writers on the same page, (3) direct your writers to stick to the topic of their section, (4) run thread-based horizontal reviews, (5) for larger teams, have a continuity team run alongside your team.