RFP Projects

Tracking and Communicating Progress

RFPMonkey.com lets you record, track, and communicate important project-related dates and notes, team assignments, and overall project status and levels of completion. It does not store the final response document that will ultimately be returned to the prospect, rather facilitates the communication of assignments, acknowledgement of the receipt of those assignments, and progress made towards them. It allows team members to communicate and see progress of individual projects without requiring emails, phone calls, and in-person meetings.

Using the Projects module is particularly helpful when teams of 3 or more work together to collaborate on an RFP. When a response team is made up of either a single individual or a pair of responders, the primary benefit of using the Projects module is to communicate progress to managers or other colleagues who are not part of the particular project’s response team.

Projects List

The Projects list displays important information about your RFP projects, lets you lock or unlock individual projects, and allows you to drill down to a project’s details page.

Projects Calendar

The Projects calendar shows you project received dates (in green) and project due dates (in red), and allows users to drill down into a particular project by clicking on either of its displayed dates. Click the red arrows to move forward or backward to a future or past month.

Project Detail Screen

Selecting a project from either the Projects List screen or the Projects Calendar will display the Project Detail screen.

The Project Detail screen displays all of the project’s information such as due dates, project notes, status, etc. It also shows the project’s assignments, and the dates, notes and statuses related to those assignments.

Summary fields on the Project Detail screen record the project Name, Status, Progress, Outcome, Notes, Prospect Name, RFP Owner, Received Date, Due Date, Completed Date, Submitted Date, as well as formatting requirements for the RFP (font face, font size, and font color).

The project's progress is calculated by RFPMonkey.com based on the assignments within the project, taking into account the % Done and the Effort of each.

If a user will be jumping back and forth between the Projects tab and the Entries tab, then Connecting to a project can save time. When you are connected to a project, that project is assumed to be the context you are working within, until you disconnect from it. Being connected pre-selects the project and prevents the user from seeing other projects. It also enables linking a selected response to the project assignment following a search that is initiated from the Projects section.

Project Assignment Detail Screen

Make assignments within a project to assign specific users work that must be done to complete the RFP. Assignments will usually be either general assignments or specific topic assignments.

A general assignment would be used to assign a user responsibility for a group of questions, an entire section from an RFP, or even multiple sections. Use general assignments to document the assignment, and to capture and communicate the assignment’s progress. In these macro assignments, work may be being done within RFPMonkey.com to locate content, but that work is not recorded as part of the actual assignment.

Assignments can also be made to assign a specific RFP topic or question to an individual user. In such assignments, the assignment title is usually the actual question out of the RFP for which a response needs to be located or created. If you initiate a search from within a connected project, then you can link the assignment to one of the search results to fulfill the assignment. This automatically sets that assignment to 100% done, and updates the overall project progress accordingly.