Sometimes, in the heat of making a deadline, we make decisions without completely thinking them through. Generally, these decisions are about saving time, and they entail using short-cuts that we might not want to rely on under different circumstances.
The last century of the film industry is replete with examples of the unintended physical consequences of short-cuts, including someone “taking a short-cut” and stumbling into quicksand, a person driving off the end of a bridge not yet complete, a birthday cake with so many lit candles that it goes up in flames, and so forth. Mostly presented as comedy, or comic relief within a serious presentation, we laugh at these funny situations and tension relievers, and go on watching the movie.
But what happens when the short-cut is one taken by a firm preparing a proposal, or by a public agency preparing an RFP?
First, let’s take the case where a group developing a proposal copies something out of the boilerplate. The writer quickly scans the text to ensure that there are no references to other clients or projects, but doesn’t do a full read of the text or tailor it to this specific pursuit. So every mention of “the client” rather than using the client’s name will scream “boilerplate,” every reference to what the firm can do for "its clients" instead of this client shouts “generic,” and the client might infer that s/he and her/his project were simply not worth some original thought. In addition, any typographic or grammatical errors in the original are repeated, which the client might interpret at sloppy thinking. The unintended consequence: your short-cut submittal is evaluated as “not the team we are looking for.”
Now let’s take an example where the writer copies a text from a previous submittal. Perhaps he borrows the project approach from a proposal where the scope of work seems to be the same. But no two projects are identical—the project site terrain will be different, the local ordinances and permit requirements will be different, the climate will be different, the local building codes will be different, etc. So no two approaches will be identical. And the approach included in the proposal doesn't respond to the specific conditions of the project and site. The unintended consequence: your short-cut proposal is tossed out as “unresponsive.”
Finally, let’s take the case where a public agency used an RFP from a previous procurement. In the late 1990s, I attended a US Army Corps of Engineers conference about how the government wanted to “do business like businesses do business.” The conference included a session on how RFPs are written.
The example used was a procurement where the purchasing group had identified a Motorola product that exactly met their specifications. The purchasing officer “borrowed” an RFP, added the technical specifications for the product he wanted to buy and its maintenance schedule, and issued the RFP without looking to see if there were specifications from the previous procurement that might conflict with his current needs. When the due date arrived and proposals were opened, there was no bid from Motorola.
After the selection and contract, the purchasing officer called his Motorola contact to ask why she hadn’t bid. She explained that the Motorola product required monthly calibration but the RFP stipulated weekly calibration. In that case, Motorola would not make a profit on the contract.
The weekly calibration requirement, of course, was related to the original use of the RFP, but without reading that original RFP, the purchasing officer had no idea the requirement was there. The unintended consequence: the Corps had to settle for the “second-best” product because their own short-cut had kept the best product out of the competition.