“It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.” – Hemingway

By Bill Jaeger

Proposals are all ticking time bombs.  

Anyone who has been involved in a Federal proposal will tell you that the Government rarely gives enough time for contractors to put together a response in a calm and collected fashion. You may have the best solution with the lowest price, but nobody will care about any of that if your submission is 5 minutes late.

Solicitations are routinely issued with only a few days in which to respond, and if you and your team of writers are otherwise occupied, too bad.  Federal contracting is a competitive sport. If you snooze, you lose. As has been explained to me by several retired Feds, “Not only does the Government not know how much work goes into proposals, they don’t care.”

This is why every proposal and BD person is accustomed to working nights, weekends, holidays, and vacations to meet deadlines. That’s just part of the job. Sometimes this can work to one’s competitive advantage—say, when you’re the incumbent and already know the work so it’s much easier for you to respond—but more often than not it means that writers and proposal staff are trying to put together complex technical responses with a gun to their head.

This gets worse when the Government issues poorly written or conflicting solicitations. It’s difficult enough trying to decipher RFP requirements without them being ambiguous, unintelligible, contradictory, or missing components.

Contractors have the opportunity to ask questions regarding solicitations, of course, but this doesn’t solve the problem. Question deadlines are often much too short (e.g., a 200-page solicitation is released late on a Monday with questions due at noon on Wednesday), and the Government is often very slow to respond—all while the clock is still ticking. Extensions are ubiquitous, of course, but they’re an unknown factor that’s impossible to plan around.

For example: I’m currently working on a significant bid. The RFP was released with a month to respond, but the questions were due nearly 3 weeks following RFP release... which means the Government only ever had 2 weeks in which to respond without giving anybody any time to adjust to answers assuming they answered on the day questions were due.

This is compounded by the fact that the RFP is absolutely wretched: e.g., it’s missing referenced components (including the PPQ template and technical requirements); every single cross-reference is wrong; and it’s unclear and contradictory regarding teaming arrangements.  At the moment we’re not even sure if we can bid even though we were pre-approved to do so.

As a result, we’re in what a retired Army Colonel once described to me as “dynamic limbo” where we don’t know what we’re dealing with, we don’t know when we’ll find out, and we don’t know how much time we’ll have to adjust and respond—it could be a week or it could be a month.  We’ve no idea.  Neither I nor my client can plan around it. 

If the goal of the Government was to drive off bidders they’re doing a fine job, but they could’ve done it without wasting so much time and money (never mind the grief). As it is, there are at least half a dozen other bidders out there who’re in the same boat as we are judging by the questions that have been posted.

It doesn’t have to be like this, and it shouldn’t be. If the goal is to get the best offers to the Government, Contracting Officers need to include realistic timeframes in solicitations, and acknowledge that they and their staff need time to answer the questions we ask.

If Federal contracting offices need more time that’s fine too, but tell us!  Drop an amendment with an extension stating “We’re working on questions and will extend the deadline by X” and then follow through. 

Everyone—including the Government—will benefit.