Many GovCon organizations use SharePoint for proposals. Generally, they use SharePoint to store documents and manage documents along with supporting information related to proposals. This is a good start.
In addition, SharePoint has the ability to organize information by “sites”. A site becomes a way to secure documents and information as a group. So, separate sites are often used for each proposal.
Using SharePoint out-of-the-box for these purposes, organizations get robust document management that can be applied to managing the information of proposals. But, that is about it. What you do not get is actual automation of the proposal development work. The system is not designed to drive work and to manage the work. Yet, this is where the productivity comes in. This covers everything else that needs to get done to advance a proposal document set along your development path to a final product.
Some of the key elements missing are:
- The ability to drive writer and reviewer work assignments workflows.
- Ability for writers and reviewers to see just their assignments and assigned documents and work in co-authoring.
- Collaborative commenting about individual documents (inline with each document) and a history of activity.
- Automatic tracking of where each document stands, ie., “whose got the ball”.
- Having proposal knowledge assets at your fingertips to reuse and access without having to leave your proposal site to go somewhere else.
- Ability of system to automatically update people when work is done and automatically update the status.
- Ability to work with documents across different libraries and take actions.
- Workspaces for color reviews and/or gate reviews that don’t require you to make copies of documents and also allow for collaborative commenting on them.
- The ability to act of a group of documents (bulk action) to change status, copy to another location, assign, change due dates, etc.
- Seeing scheduled color reviews, customer milestones and key events of multiple proposals on a master calendar.
So, without the above elements available in the system, people just do things manually. They email documents around and manually transcribe email or meeting comments. They have meetings to make assignments and tell people what to work on in a library of all of the documents. They keep spreadsheets to track status. They make multiple copies and use folders. All of these manual activities take time, are a distraction and open you up to things falling through the cracks.
Fortunately, SharePoint is also a development platform. Some organizations have the internal skilled development resources, the money and the time to custom build out enhancements and extensions to SharePoint to support automation in proposal development work. But, this is challenging to do well and few organizations have the means to make it happen.
Get better faster and less expensively, by dropping in WinCenter Proposal Management
There is an easier way to get there. You can just drop in R3 WinCenter.
R3 WinCenter runs right on top of SharePoint. It is like dropping in a layer of “work management for proposals” on top of SharePoint. You still have the benefits of the worlds leading content management platform. But, you now have a work environment, user experience and features designed to meet your needs for proposal development work.
Your proposal development work now becomes streamlined and automated. It is controllable. You get real-time visibility and real collaboration. And, you simply eliminate most of the manual work required when using native SharePoint. Poof!
To really appreciate how much better your work can be, it helps to experience it. So, below is a short video that covers a few of the key enhancements of a WinCenter proposal site vs. a native SharePoint site.
To learn more about WinCenter, visit the WinCenter product page.