Background

Faircloth Information Technologies Inc. (FIT Systems) is a federal contractor located in Tampa, Florida. Founded in 1998, FIT Systems is a Service Disabled Owned Small Business (SVDBOSB) and a Small Business Administration (SBA) Minority Owned 8(a) firm.

FIT Systems specializes in providing Information Technology services such as Business Process Reengineering, Independent Verification and Validation, Software Quality Assurance, Requirements Development, Project Management and Process Improvement services to federal customers. In mid August of 2008, FIT Systems received notice that a Request for Proposal (RFP) document was issued by the Veterans Benefit Administration (VBA) Office of Resource Management (ORM) for Functional Analysis Support Services. The VBA is one of the three major divisions of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA):

• The Veterans Health Administration, responsible for healthcare services and medical research.

• The Veterans Benefits Administration, responsible for all ongoing financial benefits including initial veteran registration, eligibility determination and five core lines of business: Home Loan Guaranty, Insurance, Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment, Education (GI Bill) and Compensation & Pension.

• The National Cemetery Administration, providing burial and memorial benefits and maintaining and administering the national VA cemeteries.

FIT Systems holds numerous contracts with the VBA, and the management of the firm decided to aggressively pursue this opportunity to expand the company’s contract portfolio by securing the Prime Contractor position on this new multi-year contract. As an executive at FIT Systems, the responsibility for generating the technical proposal for the RFP Response Package fell to Cecil Thornhill, the firm’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The technical response needed to be completed before the 11:00AM EST, September 03, 2008 deadline set by the government.

Approach to the Response

Most federal RFPs follow a highly structured format. They are typically large and complex documents that provide all the information needed to understand the opportunity being presented, and structure the written reply. This makes the job of the respondent much easier, as the outline of the response required and the details of the material to be provided are given in the RFP. The creation of a response remains demanding due to the need to analyze the detailed material in the RFP and organize all the response materials to present a firm’s best features in a short time.  The first task is to read and understand the RFP, paying close attention to the organization and specific requirements of the requested response.

After analysis, the next step is to create an outline structured to match the requested order of response materials. Once the outline is built, you create the written response answering all the questions from the RFP and provide all the supporting documentation or new information requested. This often requires research and the creation of extensive written descriptions of services and systems to be provided as part of the work described in the RFP’s Statement of Work section.

In the technical response to the ORM RFP, Cecil built an outline and generated a rough draft containing at least minimal responses to all materials requested. The sections he could not answer were marked and submitted to other executives for response. Cecil also created a work plan for the response, indicating what materials needed to be developed by other individuals and giving deadlines for the submission of the material for final review and re-writing. Given the approximate two-week turn around, scheduling and document version management was critical.

Issues

Three major issues came up in developing this response:

1. Domain Knowledge – there were sections of the response that required deep domain knowledge of the activities of the VBA ORM, well outside the scope of Cecil’s knowledge. Dealing with these sections required extensive research and interviews with key personnel to provide material for an appropriate response. Some paragraphs had to be outsourced to specialists and then re-written to fit in the response.

2. Recasting to Fit the ORM RFP Outline – the ORM RFP required a divergence from prior VBA outlines. Existing materials and document structures had to be altered to fit this new outline. This required extensive new material to be written and major changes in the relationship of existing materials, such as the past performance write-ups. Ensuring that all the materials made it into the new structure and were consistently written, was a challenge.

3. Time and Personnel Management – time was short to create this document. Managing available time to best effect was key to success. Prioritizing writing tasks made this possible. There was also the issue of getting other people who do not report to the primary author, Cecil, to deliver materials on time. Doing this in a positive manner required constant attention and careful wording of requests.

Conclusions/Results/Lessons Learned

On the final morning of submission, the document was still missing critical paragraphs from upper management. This required an emergency effort to create the missing material and correct any format issues in the submission document only minutes before the deadline. The document was finished and submitted with about one minute to spare. There was no time for a comprehensive final review and editing. This was far too close to be comfortable, but since the response won the award of the contract, this was not a disaster.

As a result of this experience, the author has determined to create back-ups for any critical sections, regardless of who they are assigned to, so that language is available for future responses to prevent last minute panic. Another outcome is that the entire organization has started to synchronize response efforts more closely, and this has eased the response process buy sharing the writing load.

While the document submitted could have benefited from the planned final review and edits, it did win the bid. As such, this document did its job of communicating the capabilities of FIT Systems to provide the required services in the most effective manner, and it may be counted a success.