For big business, the problem is maintaining the boilerplate and filing it in a way that permits the users to find the sections they need.  How well businesses handle their boilerplate is significant, because the quality of boilerplate affects proposal costs and proposal wins. 

 

The solution is a combination of tools, policies, procedures, and hard work to put all the pieces together, and then a great deal of common sense in the application of the materials to the proposal efforts.  When many boilerplate approaches fail, the failure can often be attributable to focusing on one part (the up-front structure or the application implementation) and neglecting the other.  There have been many efforts to put in place costly tools that end up housing only a small amount of data.  In other companies, there may be extensive libraries of boilerplate that are poorly maintained or rarely applied. 

 

In the past, small businesses found it difficult to justify the expensive off-the-shelf solutions that offered very elegant storage and retrieval capabilities.  This was particularly true when the price was based on a seat license arrangement.  Even large businesses found the COTS solutions expensive, because the potential number of seats was very large.  As with any IT product line, the passage of time has overcome much of the cost barrier.  Very powerful tools are more affordable or a significant library retrieval capability comes free with the purchase of hardware.  Such is the case with Microsoft Index Server, which accompanies the purchase of an NT server. It supports the compilation and key-word-searching of a large collection of files, with minimal operator time required for set-up, and can be accessed from a network or a web-site application. 

Now, with tools becoming less of a barrier, the process for collecting materials becomes more crucial.  Here is an area where small businesses have an advantage, because it is easier to address their universe of potential documentation, enforce collection processes and update materials.  Large businesses face a diverse set of requirements, a varying range of corporate priorities and a work force that is more difficult to control process-wise. 

 

The proposal boilerplate needs include resumes, corporate experience citations, and past proposal sections.  The latter includes both full proposals that can be searched for two purposes.  The first is to find full topical sections that can be revised to fit a similar requirement for another proposal; this would include such sections as a Management Plan, T&E Plan, Security section, Software Development Plan or many others.  The second purpose is to find those small “golden nuggets” that help fill in the supporting details of another proposal.  This would include a drop-in piece of art, a list of tools, a trade study, or a unique cost basis-of-estimate.

 

 A major issue in boilerplate use is the potential over-reliance on the existing material.  Knowing the boilerplate is available, some contributors procrastinate or allocate precious little time to the planning of their sections, and the result is a collection of disparate write-ups in which the total is not greater than, nor even equal to, the sum of all its parts. The boilerplate user must consider all of the available “pre-written” material to be pieces that can contribute (often with much revision) to a first draft.  The current proposal may have very different requirements than the proposals that included the various boilerplate materials, and thus the customer may not see his needs being met by your poorly contrived collection of piece parts.