After just completing a proposal, I am reminded how far we have come in the years since I began my career in government contracting back in 1978. One of my very first assignments was working on large proposal for an aerospace contractor. We were bidding on a program with NASA for a scientific satellite. There wasn’t a person in our company working on the main campus who was not involved somehow in the preparation of this massive effort.
There were no desktop computers. We had a single word processor which took up most of small room and was only used by the sole operator. Every executive, manager and many supervisors had a secretary and all the secretaries were called on to work the proposal. We worked every single day for six weeks, 10 – 16 hour days, around the clock at the end. Food was brought in to provide sustenance so we could keep working. All the writing was done on lined paper, turned over to a secretary with a typewriter or the single word processor for typing. Corrections and rewrites were done using liquid “wite-out” or correction tape. When a page got too messy, it was retyped, and if the corrections caused impact to following pages, whole sections were retyped. There is no telling how many times a single page may have been retyped.
There was no email. Typed sections were copied and hand-carried or sent via the mailroom to the reviewers. Reviewers hand-marked their corrections and comments to be sent back to the authors for incorporation. There was no “spell-check”. Reviewers and editors had to look for spelling and grammatical errors. Authors had to look at the multiple copies with comments and combine them into a single copy for return to a secretary for typing.
The entire graphics department was devoted to this proposal. Diagrams were hand-drawn, sent to the graphics department to be re-drawn by a graphic artist, sent back to the author for review, back to the graphic artist for correction or re-do, as many times as necessary to get it right. Our campus had 5 buildings and a young man was hired for the duration of the effort to do nothing but run the graphics around the campus between the authors and the graphics department.
There was a reproduction department in one of our buildings with large copy machines for producing large volume copies. They were running 24 hours a day at the end. A conference room was dedicated to “book checking” where book-checkers would manually go through each copy to make sure all pages were present and cleanly printed. The final product was a 45-volume proposal, multiple copies of each, which filled an entire shipping container that was flown across the country to be delivered to NASA. In typical government fashion, the proposal was due right after Thanksgiving requiring all of us to work through the holiday weekend. Adding insult to injury, we were not selected for award.
In the proposal just completed, authors and reviewers were located in the US and Asia. Internet storage (Box) was used to store all the proposal files. Meetings were conducted via the internet with screen-sharing to look at proposal documents. Communication was mainly by email. Track changes was used to redline proposal sections so multiple reviewers could put their comments in a single document. The updated documents could be simultaneously accessed. When completed, the proposal was uploaded to a government site and an automatic receipt generated. No trees were sacrificed in the preparation of this proposal!
Every time I work a proposal, I remember that very first proposal I worked on and count my blessings that technology has allowed us to efficiently produce a proposal at a much lower cost – both in dollars and human expense. Win or lose, the investment was less than it would have been so many years ago.