[Request]: Consider creating new content re: common mistakes agencies make in writing proposals for professional software services #690

A description of the work

De-risking Guide 2.0 includes a section on the "Rationalized, competitive award process." The section closes by noting that if vendors are requesting more narrative space for a proposal, it may indicate that "The government’s request was poorly written and is confusing to potential bidders."

During content testing of the guide, a state employee suggested: "it may be helpful to link to "common mistakes" agencies make in written proposals. I understand that a lengthy vendor response indicates I put out a bad proposal, but it doesn't help me understand why the proposal was bad and how to correct it."

Context: When the FFS Team revised the De-risking Guide, it kept a list of backlog items for possibly addressing in future iterations. As the project lead during close-out, I transferred that list to the Guides repo.

Point of contact on this issue

Amelia Wong or Laura Poncé

Reproduction steps (if necessary)

No response

Skills Needed

• Any Human
• Design
• Content
• Engineering
• Acquisition
• Product
• Other

Does this need to happen in the next 2 weeks?

• Yes
• No

How much time do you anticipate this work taking?

A few weeks

Acceptance Criteria

This ticket would involve:

• assessing the utility of the requested content by having conversations with relevant 18F staff (starting with Acq) to decide if content on common mistakes in proposals should be developed/added (or if an existing resource could be linked to from the DRG)
• if no, you're done.
• if yes, the next step is figuring out what should be said or linked to with relevant 18F staff input
• if new content is needed, writing/editing content
• notifying TTS Outreach of changes to see if new content requires going through GSA concurrence
• going through GSA concurrence, if needed
• publishing