The holiday handoff runbook
What to write so the on-call proposal lead isn't paged at 11pm on December 23. A 30-minute template that pays for itself the first time a portal deadline moves.
The last week of December is not a production week. It is an on-call week. A small portion of the proposal team stays reachable; everyone else takes time away. The difference between a calm week and a chaotic one is whether the on-call person has the information they need when something breaks, without having to wake up a colleague who is on vacation.
This is the 30-minute runbook template. It goes out on the last working day before the break. It is read once. It is used only if needed.
The cover sheet
Top of the runbook. Five fields, filled in.
- On-call lead: name, phone, personal email.
- Backup lead: name, phone, personal email.
- Break dates: from date, to date.
- Active in-flight pursuits: a numbered list by proposal ID, with deadline.
- Passive pursuits: pursuits where nothing should change over the break but where addenda could land.
The personal contact method is the one the lead checks. Not the work email. Not the work Slack. If the lead has a phone and a personal email, both go on the sheet.
Per-pursuit section
For every in-flight pursuit, a short block. Four fields.
Deadline. The literal date and time, with timezone and the portal’s stated timezone if they differ. Every year there is a pursuit where somebody reads a 5:00 PM Eastern deadline as 5:00 PM Pacific. Spell it out.
What is pending. Specifically what is waiting for what. “Pricing is drafted, waiting on CFO sign-off, CFO returns January 3.” “Security questionnaire is 80% complete, three answers require InfoSec review, InfoSec returns January 5.” Not “almost done.” Name the pending items.
The stop-work threshold. The condition that says “wake the lead up.” Usually: an addendum posts, the deadline moves, the portal goes down, a buyer-side Q&A asks a substantive question that wasn’t in the original RFP. Each pursuit might have its own.
The nothing-to-do threshold. Equally important. The conditions that don’t page the lead: a portal email that says “your response was received,” a status ping from a sales AE, a routine calendar invite for a kickoff in February. These land in the on-call inbox and they should land without a page.
The tooling section
Three lines that belong on every runbook. Nobody remembers them in the moment.
- Where each in-flight response lives (the URL to the draft, the URL to the compliance matrix, the URL to the capture plan). Not the folder. The file.
- How to access the buyer’s portal. Who holds the credentials. The backup login path. The support phone number for the portal. Portal logins are the #1 thing an on-call lead can’t locate at 11pm when everyone they’d ask is asleep.
- Who to call if a submission fails. The portal’s support line, the proposal lead’s cellphone, the backup’s cellphone, in that order.
The “do nothing” section
The most important section. Three to six sentences. Explicit permission not to act.
Defaults that the on-call lead should not override unless the stop-work threshold fires:
- New RFPs that arrive during the break: acknowledge receipt, do not assign internal work, route to the full team on return.
- Addenda on passive pursuits: log them, do not re-draft.
- Sales pressure to move something up: decline, point to the runbook.
- Questions from SMEs whose answers are not blocking a submission this week: triage to January.
Lohfeld Consulting has named the pattern where proposal teams compress win-relevant work into the last 48 hours of a cycle. The inverse pattern — teams who work through a nominal break because the runbook didn’t give them permission to rest — is a closely related failure mode. The “do nothing” section is the written permission. It has to be written down. A verbal “take the week off” gets overridden by the first customer email.
What the runbook is not
It is not a project plan. It is not a status update. It is not a mechanism to finish the year’s work in the last week. If a pursuit is actually pending meaningful work, that work happens before the break or it gets pushed to January. The runbook covers the pursuits that are between two working phases, not the ones in flight.
The hand-off meeting
Twenty minutes, on the last working day. The outgoing team walks the on-call lead through the runbook live. The on-call lead asks questions. The questions the lead asks — which ones the runbook didn’t already answer — get added to the runbook before everyone logs off. The version that goes to storage is the post-walk-through version, not the pre-walk-through version.
That is the full template. A runbook drafted in 30 minutes, a walk-through in 20, and a quiet week that costs the team nothing.
The follow-up note on what the first version of this runbook missed — the questions we had to add after the fact — ships later this week.