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I didn’t work for McKinsey, but did work for Booz Allen Hamilton and can provide a response based on my experience there and other consulting firms. Competitive proposal writing was one of my major strengths over my long consulting career.Proposals can be for sole source or competitive engagements. They can be based on requests for proposals (RFPs), as part of the business selling process, or unsolicited. They can be letter proposals (3–12 pages) or full size proposals (13–50 pages or more). Many competitive proposals to the U.S. Federal Government exceed 100 pages.The outline below is based on a presentation I gave to the Institute of Management Consultants and National Writer’s Union on “Expert Proposal Writing.” It applies to all types and sizes of proposals, with minor variation.Where there is an RFP, proposal writers should always follow the RFP instructions and evaluation criteria regarding the specific format and areas to emphasize. The approach should work equally well for both the narrative text or presentation style for the proposal.1. Executive Summary2. Background and Understanding3. Technical Approach/Work Plan4. Management and Staffing5. Corporate Qualifications6. Staff Qualifications (Resumes)7. Costing/Pricing8. Appendices, as appropriate.

This is a great question, and I’m glad you asked, Sullivan Wenger!*Rubs hands together, cracks knuckles.*The history on this is rather fascinating.The first thing to understand is that the people who went to the Continental Congress in 1787 didn’t initially show up to write a Constitution. They were there to tweak something called the Articles of Confederation.When the thirteen original colonies decided to declare independence from the British, they didn’t see themselves as one big happy country with sub-unit provinces. Each of these colonies viewed themselves as independent nation-states, as sovereign as Germany or Denmark. The Continental Congress was a confederation style government, sort of a loose coalition more akin to the United Nations or European Union, with trade and mutual defense purposes.The Articles of Confederation allowed for the Continental government to request money from the States, but they were under no obligation to actually send it. However, the Continental government also shouldered much of the burden of the Revolutionary War. By 1787, it was pretty much flat broke.And that meant it was having trouble giving back pay to Revolutionary vets, who were, of course, entirely fine with not getting pai… just kidding. A disgruntled vet named Daniel Shays decided he was going to get his money one way or the other, gathered up a mob of other disgruntled vets, and marched on the armory at Springfield, Massachusetts to seize their weapons stockpile. While the rebellion was put down, the Continental government was pretty much powerless in the process.There was relatively little support to create a stronger central government initially, though.Again: keep in mind that these colonies were founded on the strong belief in self-governance and an almost anarchist-level distrust of centralized government. The idea of ceding back a bunch of self-governance to a stronger government was, in many minds, just a giant leap back towards the tyranny of monarchy.The Constitutional ConventionHamilton and Madison pulled one of the greatest bait-and-switches in history at what would become the Constitutional Convention in 1787. After everyone showed up to tweak the Articles, they proposed what was at the time a very untested political model: the federation.Confederated governments were nothing new; they had been used for centuries at that point. Enlightenment thinkers had written extensively about the political theories of confederated governments. Federated governments, with a stronger central government and quasi-sovereign sub-states, had been theorized, but as far as most Enlightenment thinkers were concerned, it was highly untested. (This tends to ignore a couple of successful federal system governments even in Europe that predated the United States, such as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and arguably the Holy Roman Empire to an extent.)Two factions quickly broke out: the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, and the Anti-Federalists, led by George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams.George Mason, in particular, was vehemently outspoken about the dangers of granting power to a centralized government. He was deeply worried about the potential abuses of power.Hamilton and Madison argued that the new centralized government would be deliberately weakened and power divided enough to require strong consensus from all stakeholders, even if it was stronger than the Continental government under the Articles.Hamilton in particular argued that the proposed Constitution would create a government of enumerated powers. It would only be allowed to do the very narrow, specific things that the Constitution provided for it to do, nothing more, nothing less.The Anti-Federalists worried that this would be used to trample on the rights of individual states and individual freedoms. They wanted specific rights outlined in this proposed Constitution that would be protected, and specific provisions in the Constitution prohibiting the proposed centralized government from infringing on those rights.The Federalists were also worried about the rights of states to govern themselves and individual freedoms, but were nervous about spelling out certain rights to be protected. What if they missed one or more? They had deliberately included a provision to amend the Constitution, but it was really difficult to do that. If they started listing rights and didn’t think of something, it would be really tough to protect that right.And worse, if a right was drafted into the Constitution and they didn’t word it carefully enough, that right might get misinterpreted or even twisted into something it was not meant to protect.That was the basis of Hamilton’s argument for not including a Bill of Rights: if the government was only granted specific, certain powers, all other rights were by extension automatically protected because the government wasn’t specifically empowered to infringe upon those rights.The Continued Constitutional ConventionAfter the initial Continental Congress meeting of May through September in 1787, the draft Constitution was sent out to the States for debate and ratification.But the Anti-Federalists were not to be swayed about ratification, and it became clear relatively early on that even if the proposed Constitution and its carefully enumerated powers were agreed upon, it would not be ratified by the States without a specific Bill of Rights.Eventually Madison and the other Federalists caved and in 1789, in order to get the holdout states on board, Madison proposed almost 20 amendments to the proposed Constitution.About a dozen of them survived committee in the House and Senate and were moved for ratification to the States. Ten were ratified and became the Bill of Rights we know and love today. The proposed First Amendment would have established how big the House of Representatives would be based on population, and the proposed Second Amendment prohibiting Congress from raising its own pay during the same session was eventually ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment.One of the chief compromises was what would become the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. The Ninth was to appease the Federalists, enshrining the idea that there were lots of other rights out there and we just couldn’t think of them and write them down but they’re totes still protected. The Tenth was to appease the Anti-Federalists, enshrining the idea that everything that wasn’t specifically given to the new Federal government was the domain of the individual States. For example, the new Constitution didn’t give the Federal government much in the way of police powers - so that belonged to the States.Some of the Amendments went through almost crazy revision processes. The Second Amendment in particular ended up jamming together language from the House and the Senate with commas placed almost seemingly at random. The first proposed drafts are all over the board. One put the right to bear arms in with the rights of free press and a “right of conscience” because the people of the United States are peaceable citizens, while another draft was clear that the right to bear arms was for the purpose of militia service, “but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms.”One of Madison’s proposed Amendments that failed to pass committee would have specifically prohibited the individual States from abridging “the equal rights of conscience, or the freedom of the press, or the trial by jury in criminal cases,” which could have immeasurably changed the early history of the country.Two Years Later…Now, keep in mind that the Constitution itself had been drafted, agreed upon, and the first draft sent to the States for ratification in 1787 - it was two years later when the Federalists caved and proposed adding these amendments to the Constitution.At the time, Madison was quite vehement that they should not be appended to the Constitution as Amendments, but that they should be interwoven into the original document itself.Madison also wanted to add a sort of pre-preamble that would have buried the whole “we the people” bit into the middle of the preamble and added this bit to the beginning:“First. That there be prefixed to the Constitution a declaration, that all power is originally vested in, and consequently derived from, the people.That Government is instituted and ought to be exercised for the benefit of the people; which consists in the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the right of acquiring and using property, and generally of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.That the people have an indubitable, unalienable, and indefeasible right to reform or change their Government, whenever it be found adverse or inadequate to the purposes of its institution.”Madison’s proposal to add this to the beginning and interweave the changes into the rest of the Constitution both failed, and eventually the various proposals for the Bill of Rights were drafted into separate, individual amendments. Congress’ chief concern was that it would look like the Constitution was being rewritten instead of amended, and eventually Madison just gave up on the fight during the floor debate in the House and let everything get tacked on to the end of the Constitution instead.In SummarySo, there you have it: the reason the Bill of Rights wasn’t in the original draft of the Constitution mostly comes down to that the folks in the Convention were largely afraid of missing something, the reason it was eventually added two years later was to appease the opponents of the proposed document, and the reason it was added as amendments instead of woven into the document itself was essentially Congress saying “we don’t really like the formatting and it might confuse people as to which version we’re on.”Here’s a kitten as a reward for reading a moderately long answer about political history.You’re welcome.

The award of US Federal contracts is governed by a broad set of regulations called the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR). In general, the FAR defines the form and format of the documents the Federal Government issues to competitively solicit the services and/or products it wishes to buy. State and local governments have similar rules and regulations. The solicitation documents are often referred to as a Request for Proposal (RFP) and usually require a response in 30 to 45 days from the date of their official release.Regardless of the relative size and complexity of the RFP documents (which normally correlates to the size and complexity of the services and/or products being procured), strict adherence to the RFP's instructions to offerors is key to preparing a winning proposal. Unfortunately, simply following the RFP instructions is not sufficient enough to win against knowledgeable competitors. Following the instructions (referred to as compliance) is just one element of a winning proposal - the Government also evaluates the adequacy of the response. Keep in mind that proposals are not read by the evaluators - they are SCORED.The complexity of large Federal, State or municipal procurements, coupled with the vast sums of money at stake, dictate that a methodical, disciplined approach to proposal development be used to increase a firm's win rate. The systematic approach that we apply has consistently demonstrated the ability to increase a firm's proposal win rate from a typical industry average of 20% to over 70%.We apply a systems approach to develop winning proposals and projectize the entire process to ensure disciplined accomplishment of all tasks, on time and on budget. Three management roles are leveraged - the Capture Manager, the Proposal Manager and the Review Manager. In the simplest terms, the capture management function owns the solution. The proposal management function owns the collection of systems and project processes applied to articulate the solution in a compliant, scorable, winning proposal. The review management function provide an independent audit of certain proposal elements and serves as the chair of the internal proposal review teams.In our approach, we dedicate at least 10% of the proposal development schedule up-front to RFP requirements analysis and project planning. We analyze and allocate all RFP requirements to a compliance outline exactly aligned to the RFP instructions. We conduct a 2 - 3 day, intensive group strategy session to develop the primary proposal development tools needed to write a large, complex, multi-volume proposal. We employ integrated product teams (IPT) with named membership, defined deliverables and clear milestones to fully develop and integrate the major solution elements. IPTs are typically formed to address the concepts of operations; organizational structure; staffing and key personnel; major systems; past performance; start-up/transition; and pricing.Obviously, each IPT's work must be integrated and synched with one another. Accordingly, we employ a configuration management and quality control approach that enables each and every IPT member to review and leverage the work of every other IPT. Peer reviews and a "living wall" (either physical, electronic, or both) ensure day-to-day currency among the proposal writers and IPT leads. A series of internal proposal reviews are conducted during the proposal development process to guide, direct and correct the proposal team.Our structured review process typically includes independent audit of the compliance outline, an early-course correction opportunity via a storyboard review, which addresses major graphic elements and document layout concepts; a mid-course "pink team" review; a critical, pre-production "red team" review; and a senior management review and approval of final pricing via a "gold team" review. Review check-sheets and scoring forms provide a disciplined approach to simulating Government evaluator-like reviews. This helps to ensure the highest quality proposal possible.You can learn more about our Federal, state and municipal business development services, including capture, proposal and review management at http://www.theproposalcenter.com .