Proposal Management & Development
THE SMA Way: Proven Best Practices
Proposal processes trace their roots to the 1960s and the work of Jim Beveridge, Hughes Aircraft, and others. In the early 1980s, we added a unique perspective by mapping the systems engineering process to proposal development. Although others continue to evolve the proposal processes—to adapt to technology, for example—the core successful implementation remains unchanged.Our proposal development associates understand why the various artifacts and reviews are necessary to achieve a winning proposal, rather than simply how to use the templates—they are more than simply “process mechanics.” As such, they can recommend improvements or enhancements to your established process, based on their knowledge of our process.
This is important since it speaks directly to process effectiveness and efficiency. Our proposal managers have the experience and leadership to work through and modify processes to achieve proposal objectives. Leveraging this capability is one reason why we have been so successful over our 40 years of providing acquisition management services.
Our five-step authoring process, complemented by daily reviews with authors to ensure compliance, develops compelling and compliant proposal content:
SMA Proposal Process Products: quality is integrated at every step. Click below for more details:
With an industry-unique understanding of what it takes to win, we understand the value of Process Tailoring for proposals with fewer and less complex requirements to make best use of staff and other resources. We also recognize there are elements outside the process environment that we may need to address as part of achieving proposal objectives. Process tailoring minimizes complexity and duration to achieve objectives on smaller, less complex proposals while using fewer resources. While there are many ways to tailor a process element, ensuring the objective of that process element is accomplished remains critical. For example, eliminating a formal Pink Team is effective if an informal review can serve as a replacement. This requires a different approach to ensure author artwork and messaging are sufficiently mature to proceed to writing draft text.
Our Books
Our Program Lifecycle Body of Knowledge series of books provide important resources for proposal managers and developers! Click a book for more information:
SMA Proposal Development Solutions
Download our Presentations
Are We Stuck in the Past?
In this presentation, SMA President and CEO, Ajay Patel, CF APMP, asks if we have neglected proposal text by focusing too much on the graphics. Do we need to re-emphasize proposal text as the cohesive glue that binds the graphics and tells our story?