Proposed

I hate working proposals. Hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

Hate.

For those of you not in the government-contractor world, this is how it works: The government issues a Request for Proposal, which is anywhere from 50 to 300 pages of dense legalese explaining what the project is that they want to get done and exactly how they want the proposals built and what criteria they'll use to choose among the submitting candidates. We then have about a month -- that's an average; I've seen them as short as a week and as long as three months -- to put together our company's proposal, which is generally about the same size as the RFP. It's much more complicated and messy than this, of course. Especially because all the usual work we have to do doesn't exactly stop while we do all this proposal stuff, so you have to decide what falls through the cracks, and more often than not, even after you've eliminated or postponed the cruft, lots of people still have to work overtime. (And we're all salaried, of course, so that's unpaid overtime.)

The first time I was asked to work on a proposal, I worked 12-hour days for the better part of a week to get my section done. When I'd finished, I turned in my section... and the manager in charge of the proposal decided she didn't like it, threw it all out, and had someone else rewrite it.

This is not remotely uncommon, though I didn't realize it at the time.

HATE.

Alas for me: my boss has apparently decided that no major proposal shall be submitted without my stamp on it. So to speak.

Usually, he just has me review stuff that other people have written, to fix grammar and make readability suggestions. Sometimes, if we've got a tight pagecount limit (the RFP will tell us how many pages we're allowed to submit for various sections, and usually also tells us exactly what font and point size to use, too) he'll use me to help trim wordy bits down.

This time, he put me in charge of gathering and polishing the resumes for our key personnel. I've already bitched about that, but it wasn't going to make me work late.

Then I looked at the proposal outline and realized I'd been written in for a few other paragraphs, here and there. It made sense -- they were paragraphs on QA, and Risk Management, and other things that are closely tied to process, which is my job. That was enough to push me to some overtime, but not a lot. I've done these for previous proposals; all I had to do was pull some old files and rearrange them so they contained all the keywords from this particular RFP. A few hours, tops.

And then they decided that they were going to put me in charge of the Past Performance section. This is, in essense, the company's resume. We list a (specified) number of contracts we've already worked, and describe how they relate to this contract, and explain how wonderfully we did them. And there's a questionnaire we have to send to our customers from those previous contracts that they fill out and send back to the government (so we can't see their answers) so the government can find out whether we were really wonderful or what.

So now I've got to come up with seven 2-page project descriptions, in which I have to try to make us sound amazing! and cutting-edge! and indispensable! and most of all relevant! The seven projects we're showcasing have already been chosen for me. One of them belongs to the subcontractor we're teamed with on the proposal, and another is for a project in another division of the company. Someone else will write those, but I'll have to vet and edit them. (One of them has already come in. It's 4 pages long -- somehow, I have to figure out how to cut it in half.) And I'll more or less be writing the other five myself.

And it'll all be due before the end of next week.

On top of all the other work I've got, which has not exactly been scarce, lately.

Which is why I expect to be working some this weekend.

Yay.

Which is why I'm wearing my bearmonster shirt today.