Proposal Process/Product Paradigm

When Groups are involved in developing responses to Federal requests for proposals, they conduct a series of strategy, planning, control, and management functions. These activities are associated with a general notion of Process which, although designed to reach the ultimate goal of producing a proposal product, have limited immediate tangible regard for the product as an entity.

Other efforts are directly associated with the production, style, content, layout, format and media associated with the draft or final deliverable. These types of events are associated with the notion of Product, focused on a real entity, an outline, a portion of the document, an intermediate draft, or final product itself.

The dynamic of Process and Product is beneficial. It is not implied that a preoccupation of Process over Product or vice versa is absolutely counterproductive; on the contrary, either focus, when properly selected, is necessary for advancement of the effort. With respect to dynamic, timing, and technical parameters associated with technical proposals, the P/P model provides an explanation for conflict and provides insight on the advantages and disadvantages of assuming a preoccupation of one over another. I addressed this in my first attempt of a book dealing with Understanding Collaborative Writing of Technical Proposals with a Process Product Model. The Process/Product dynamic, in terms of efficiencies, conflicts, compromises, advantages synergism, provides insight into the management of engineering efforts. This dynamic reduces to a management dual which compromises the limited resources and time to prepare the proposal. In my second book, “Don't Judge this Book by its Title”, I investigate this and other conflicts, compromises, paradoxes and duals. With editorial license, I selected an oxymoron title as a revealing theme. Your thoughts?