Blog · Page 20
Field notes.
Page 20 of 31. Browse the archive of RFP workflows, grounded-AI architecture, and proposal operations notes.
The Monday-morning RFP triage standup
15 minutes, four questions, one decision. The weekly ritual that replaces inbox scraping and stops bid/no-bid from happening by drift.
State RFP subcontracting requirements, decoded
Five states, six clauses, and how they score. A research teardown of state-level subcontracting and small-business participation requirements with citations to each procurement code.
Shipped: answer-block tagging for win/loss cross-reference
A small change with a downstream payoff. Every answer block now carries tags for buyer, sector, theme, and outcome — wiring the foundation for the win/loss cross-reference work next month.
Three exec summaries I rewrote this week, part 5
Continuing the field-note series. Three before-and-after passages from real (anonymized) executive summaries, with the rewriting reasoning made explicit.
How the draft packet is generated, line by line
The prompt, the retrieval context, and the output template that produce an SME draft packet. A worked example from a real-shaped RFP question to a ready-to-review answer.
SME collaboration, Part 1 of 4: the async interview
Part 1 of 4 on SME collaboration. The async interview pattern: structured prompts, short turnarounds, an audit trail, and no scheduled meeting. Why it works when 'just ping them' doesn't.
The SME draft packet, generated automatically
What we ship to an SME alongside the question so they can answer in five minutes instead of fifty. The packet's components, the retrieval that builds it, and the design choices that keep the SME out of our tool.
SME collaboration is a UI problem
An opinion piece. Why 48% of teams still cite SME wrangling as their #1 problem after five years of vendor promises — and why the answer is not another tool but a better surface for the SME.
What a Forrester Wave on proposal tools would need to evaluate
Forrester has not published a Wave specifically for proposal management. A criterion-by-criterion read of what such a Wave would need to measure — where the generic rubric fits real buyer behavior, where it lags.
In preview: SME-ask tickets with SLA timers
Every SME ask creates a ticket with a deadline derived from the bid date. Open tickets show on the proposal dashboard. Missed SLAs flag, they don't auto-chase. In preview alongside the Proposal Builder section-assignment surface.
The second-question rule for SME asks
A short field-note on how to ask SMEs for input. Ask one concrete question first; save the open-ended one for after you've got the first answer.
A field guide to win themes that actually win
The canonical pillar on win themes. What they are, what they aren't, the swap-name test applied across six worked examples, and the discipline of constructing themes from capture and retiring themes that didn't earn their score bump.
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