One Sunday night 20 years ago, my wife showed up at 9:00 PM -- to drop off dinner at a client site -- for the consultants. I came to greet her in the parking lot, grabbed the food, kissed her goodnight – and dashed back to the war room. I’ve lost count [...]
Best industry wisdom is there will be minimal proposal activity during calendar quarter one of 2017. This is based on historical numbers from the Professional Services Council (PSC) and from our company OCI records. PSC Executive Vice President Alan Chvotkin said, “I think it likely the agencies will go slow from now [...]
The GSA Category Management initiative seems to be slipping under the radar. And there is no time to lose, because the comment period ends after Nov. 7. This program will hurt most industry providers. Yet many people have not yet heard about it. GSA is now at the “draft” stage and plans [...]
As we cross the frontier into the fourth industrial revolution, the Agile paradigm is leading the way in software development. This approach dates to the winter of 2001, when 17 renowned software developers met at Snowbird, Utah. Coming out of that event was the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a document that [...]
Everyone in the business is wondering, what this election will mean for the progress of proposal activities? Will it cause serious problems, be more like business as usual, or something in the middle? The Political Problem Everyone agrees, the Republic has not seen anything like this election in the 225 years under [...]
Many of us in the proposal business either haven’t heard about Category Management or are worried about what it will do to the industry. Category Management is a new initiative of GSA / OFPP designed to reform procurement. In a nutshell the idea is to divide many of the products and services [...]
Many of us are in a difficult situation with Alliant 2. We urgently want to win a seat at the table on this flagship contract. And the self-scoring method used for this proposal looks easy. Unfortunately a lot of recent experience shows that the self-scoring approach is deceptively difficult. Minor mistakes could [...]
A review of: Tilar J. Mazzeo, Writing Creative Nonfiction (THE GREAT COURSES: Chantilly, Virginia, 2012), pp. 166. Spending 90 minutes with this book lets a proposal writer move their craft a light year forward. The author has earned the right to address the topic, based on herself writing some captivating nonfiction works [...]
On June 1, the Contracting Office released a Modification of the Pro-Tech Satellite Domain requirement. This was to publish a near final draft RFP incorporating changes from Q&A and to say the final solicitation would be released about June 30. This leaves the other four PRO-TECH domains to follow in the future. [...]
The forthcoming Category Management initiative will likely disrupt the Government IT industry and the government proposal professionals who serve it. Category Management is a new paradigm developed by the GSA / OFPP to make procurement more efficient. An unintended side effect of the shift to Category Management will be a challenge especially to [...]