Case studiesCase studies

Situation

Two sister firms bidding US public-sector staffing and IT services work across state, county, municipal and cooperative purchasing vehicles, with no single person owning a response end to end.

Constraint

Public solicitations fail on compliance long before they fail on merit. A missing form, a requirement answered in the wrong section, or a submission one minute past close is disqualifying regardless of how good the rest of it is — and every agency expresses those rules differently.

Approach

I took ownership of the full lifecycle: extracting requirements into a compliance matrix built from the solicitation's own language, writing the technical and management narratives against the stated evaluation criteria, preparing pricing and cost documents, and assembling and submitting the package against the portal's rules rather than the ones we were used to.

Outcome

Contributed to more than ten awards, including Maricopa County, the State of South Carolina, the State of Kansas, Los Angeles Unified School District and the City of Santa Clara, plus cooperative awards under 1GPA and BuyBoard.

Situation

Bid status lived in people's heads and in scattered spreadsheets. Nobody could say with confidence what was in flight, what was at risk, or what had been won and lost.

Constraint

It had to work in the tools the team already had open — SharePoint and Excel Online, no new licence, no migration, no training day — or it would be abandoned inside a month like the tools before it.

Approach

An Excel-based tracking dashboard with complexity-weighted progress, so a large bid at 40% and a small one at 40% no longer looked like the same amount of work left, and a win/loss archive so past responses became something to reuse rather than something to remember.

Outcome

Management adopted it as the standard across all teams.

Situation

Every response started closer to a blank page than it needed to. The same company background, the same past performance, the same approach sections were being rewritten from memory each time.

Constraint

Public-sector responses cannot be generated. Every claim has to be defensible, every answer has to map to a requirement, and boilerplate pasted into the wrong solicitation is worse than no boilerplate at all.

Approach

A reusable boilerplate and case-study library, structured drafting templates tied to the sections solicitations actually ask for, an AI-assisted drafting step that starts from those rather than from nothing, and an automated Markdown-to-Word pipeline so formatting stopped being a separate evening's work.

Outcome

More than ten hours a week removed from manual drafting, with the review step kept human where it has to be.