In March 2020 I presented a session with Andrew Loveridge on Multilingual Content Development, Management and Strategy at APMP BPC Europe 2020 in Amsterdam – take a look at the slide deck here
In May 2020 Andrew Loveridge and I presented our session on Multilingual Content Development, Management and Strategy from APMP’s BPC Europe 2020 conference as a webinar. The recorded webinar can be accessed by APMP members on the APMP website.
I presented Content Clear Out in webinar format on the 18th of June 2020 as part of the UK APMP’s webinar event series, the recording is available via the UK APMP Community site.
Note to the reader – in this post ‘bid’ refers to all types of proposals/tenders/bids/RFIs/PQQs etc.
This is the first in a series of posts aimed at enabling and helping bid teams who are so often short on time and resource to breakdown the creation or review of a bid content library into manageable jobs a month at a time. There are a range of things to consider not least of all why you feel you need a bid content library and who to approach for senior management/stakeholder sponsorship of the project.
Bid content libraries are often viewed as ‘wants’ and not ‘needs’ in the grand scheme of things. However if you require a quick turnaround with a lean bid team, you have to have the tools at hand. Deciding to look at a bid content library project, is therefore a necessity rather than an extravagance.
You are sure there is a treasure trove of useful information available for use in your organisation – if you could only find it and sort it out and manage it. You’re also sure that it will make your life better, your bids better and help win more business, so you’re going to just do it! But…
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“Where do we start?” is the question I hear most. The best place to start is always at the beginning, to quote Lewis Carroll, “Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop” (although I’m not sure bid content ever really stops).
Which means that this month’s task is EVALUATE. At the end of this you should have an idea of where your content/content library is now and what you’re doing with content at the moment, which will enable you to plan for where you want it to end up.
EVALUATE: form an idea of the amount, number, or value of; assess
Lexico.com
To get the ball rolling you need to ask several questions and be honest about the answers. They will help to formulate and build the next steps of your project. Be sure that you speak to a representative cross-section of people involved in proposals and bids in your organisation so that you can properly identify where you’re at and what the situation actually is.
The Questions
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The most important questions to ask are:
How much time do you spend looking for information/content when you’re working on a new response document? Take some time and quantify how long you spend looking for information and how much of it is usable (by usable we are looking for things like up-to-date, accurate, well-written, has an owner we can talk to for additional information).
How much and what content do you re-use at the moment? This includes copying and pasting from recent/past bids as well as things like case studies and other supporting information usually included as appendices? You could view this as a percentage of total response or you may decide to look at types of documents e.g. RFI/PQQ documents against full response documents.
Where do you/your team save content that they can re-use? Is it centrally accessible, or on people’s hard-drives? More importantly, IS anything is saved? Is there any sort of indexing, tagging or folder structure used? How can people find out where it is?
How do people locate content they can’t find? Is there a list of sources for them to contact about different topics? Who keeps this list of key people updated? Do people share what they have looked for and sourced within the team?
What information is saved from past submissions and where? Is it just a collection of submitted documents or is there scoring and any other feedback saved alongside?
Is any sort of measurement kept of how often information is used? Does anyone know what is up-to-date? How is ‘new’ or ‘updated’ content identified and communicated to the team?
Do you have any processes in place that deal with content? Whether this is a review process or allocating an owner/Subject Matter Expert (SME) or guidance on reviewing past submissions for new information.
Do you have any sort of branding guidelines or style guide in place? Are they used? Are there existing templates you can use for submissions/content you have?
Who to Ask
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Earlier I mentioned that you need to approach a cross-section of the people involved in responses. This is important because it is not only the bid/proposal team who generate content and use it for proposals. Quite often sales teams are responsible for generating response documents for opportunities falling under a certain value threshold or that only require a certain type of solution or service – including them in your evaluation is invaluable as they often hold information that isn’t stored centrally unless there are rigorous processes in place in terms of saving and creating and using information. They also often have unique requirements in terms of content that they use and the way in which they communicate it to customers which you can incorporate into bigger and more challenging responses.
SMEs can have their own take on how their areas of expertise should be written about and communicated. If you approach them early on to understand what they are most often asked for and which sections they think are valuable, you can get a good idea of what is needed and what is missing. It’s also an opportunity to engage with them and build the foundation for ongoing collaboration (more on that to come).
Once you’ve collected all the answers to your questions, talked to everyone you can think of who is involved with bids and have it all in one place you can start looking at what the situation currently is and think about what you’d like it to be. You may have had an idea of what you though the ideal scenario for your content would be before you stated this task. Does what you have found out change that, add to or inform it in anyway?
To get ready for next month’s task collate your information from this exercise, tidy it up, record it nicely and keep it somewhere you can easily find it to refer to it in the future. You never know when a key stakeholder whose buy-in you need going forwards may be able to be swayed in your favour because of something you found out now.
Note to the reader: the term ‘bid’ is used here for consistency but also refers to any other sort of proposal/RFP/pitch etc.; ‘system’ is any sort of organisational tool that could be used to store information, it is assumed that it is likely to be digital.
Welcome to the next step on the path to a better and more effective bid content library. This month I am talking about location, location and location again. After all it’s all very well and good having all the content in the world but it doesn’t help anyone if no-one knows where to find it. Where to find it is often a very organisation-specific topic.
Fact Finding
To support your decision to hold information centrally and how you are proposing to do this you’ll need to have investigated what is there already, if and how it is used (adoption) and whether there are any guidelines that might be able to support your proposal. As in bidding – the key to any suggestion you’re going to put forward is evidence (concrete evidence is better than anecdotal evidence every time).
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Start out by looking at:
What systems are already in place to store information? These could include shared network drives, SharePoint or similar systems, bespoke databases etc.
Where do people currently store things (their own drives or centrally, e.g. team-share drive)?
Which of these are easy to use/used by most members of the team and/or other people who need access to the content? Find out if you can how often they use each of these.
Are there any corporate/organisational guidelines in place on how and where information should be saved? Some companies have very clear guidelines on how data should be stored and the permissions around data storage and access, others less so.
The Ideal Location
The ideal location for anything is always going to be somewhere that is easily Shared, properly Indexed, Logical and Central (SILC) (so you’ll be able to find it again). This can sound like utopia in the bid world I know, but it is the guiding light to finding the right place and maximising the use of anything you create and store.
Make sure it’s SILC…
A word of caution, at this point it is very appealing to go off and run a procurement for an amazing database or other RFP automation tool. Hold your horses – tools like that are great, but they won’t work without good content anyway, so unless you’re in the process of digital transformation and an IT project is underway to redo databases and systems, start small and use what you have. That will help you when you do come to working out what would be the best solution in terms of location for your team and organisation as a whole. It also means that the focus will stay on the quality of the content you have as you go through it and reorganise it into its new location.
The Actual Location
In most organisations you will find that you need to simply repurpose and sort out what is currently in use or create a new space that can be shared appropriately. There are several steps to this which I have outlined below:
If you’re not already using a central space (e.g. network drive, SharePoint site, automation tool or similar) to store information in, approach IT and ask for a space that the team can share and that can be permissioned for other people to be able to access it if needed (e.g. sales, SMEs) (ask for admin rights, and where possible have another person as an admin as well – this can save a lot of time when allowing others to access information going forward).
If there’s already a space, or spaces, that are being used, decide which ONE it’s going to be – the key here will be to choose the one that can be permissioned appropriately, is easy to access from anywhere (e.g. remotely) and can be indexed or tagged to make it searchable
Communicate to everyone who needs to know WHICH location is THE location to save things to from now on (this makes it easier when you start sorting through things as all the more recent information should then be where it should be)
Don’t worry about shifting everything across just yet or organising it too much at this point – it is okay if it’s a collection area to start with as you’ll be tackling the sorting out in a month or two.
Make sure that it is accessible to everyone who needs access – whether to save things there or extract information from it. Run a test with everyone to make sure they have access
If you have spare time and it’s a new location that you’ve set up, you might want to copy/shift everything across from everywhere else at this point so that it’s all in one space until you have a moment to start the sorting out and updating process.
Remember that as time goes by and the organisation evolves and changes the location may change. The important part now is to work towards determining a central, shareable, searchable and logical space for your information to be stored.
And spare a moment and start imagining how you will create your folder hierarchy – remember it shouldn’t take more than three levels to find what you’re looking for e.g. Services/Consultancy/Proposal_Library.
The Content Conundrum 