Be as specific as you can about what you need

The quality of a consulting proposal is directly proportional to the quality of the brief it responds to. A vague brief invites assumptions; and assumptions made at proposal stage have a habit of becoming points of contention later in the engagement.

Before issuing an RFP, it’s worth investing time in defining the problem as precisely as possible. What does success look like – not in general terms, but specifically? What are the known constraints – timeline, budget, internal resource, regulatory requirements? What has already been tried, and what happened? What decisions will need to be made during the programme, and who will make them?

The more clearly the brief articulates what’s needed, the more accurately proposals will reflect what the work actually requires. That clarity benefits everyone, and it makes comparing responses considerably more straightforward.

Ask for scope to be explicit – in both directions

A proposal should be clear about what it includes. It should be equally clear about what it doesn’t. The exclusions are often more informative than the inclusions, and they’re the section most likely to be read quickly rather than carefully.

When reviewing proposals, it’s worth checking explicitly: what assumptions has this been built on, and what happens to the scope, and the cost, if those assumptions don’t hold? Where are the boundaries of this engagement, and what sits outside them? If there are elements of the programme that will need to be handled separately – by internal teams, by other partners, or in a subsequent phase – are those clearly identified?

This isn’t about catching anyone out. It’s about ensuring that everyone has the same understanding of what’s been agreed before the work begins. Misaligned expectations at proposal stage are one of the most consistent sources of friction in consulting engagements, and they’re largely avoidable with the right conversation early on.

Build contingency in from the start

No programme of meaningful complexity runs exactly as planned. Timelines shift, scope evolves, decisions take longer than expected, and things that looked straightforward in the proposal turn out to have dependencies that nobody had fully mapped. This is not a failure of planning, it’s the nature of transformation work.

The organisations that navigate this well are the ones that have built contingency into their budgets and their plans from the outset, rather than treating the proposal figure as a fixed ceiling. A realistic contingency – typically in the range of 10 to 20% depending on programme complexity and the maturity of the brief – provides the flexibility to absorb the unexpected without derailing the engagement or triggering difficult conversations about additional funding mid-programme.

It’s also worth agreeing upfront how changes to scope will be handled. What is the process for identifying, agreeing, and pricing additional work? Who has the authority to approve it? Having a clear, agreed mechanism for this before it’s needed makes the conversation considerably easier when it arises, and in a complex programme, it will arise.

Compare proposals on a like-for-like basis

When evaluating competing proposals, the headline figure is rarely the most useful point of comparison. What matters is what that figure actually covers, and whether the proposals are genuinely comparable in scope, approach, and deliverables.

A useful discipline is to map each proposal against the same set of requirements and check, line by line, whether each element has been addressed and how. Where one proposal includes something that another doesn’t, that difference needs to be understood before a decision is made. Is the excluded element genuinely out of scope, or has it simply not been priced? Will it need to be done regardless, and if so, by whom, and at what cost?

This kind of structured comparison takes more time than a straightforward price comparison. It also tends to produce better decisions, and better programmes as a result.

The conversations worth having before you sign

Beyond the written proposal, the pre-contract conversations are where a great deal of important ground gets covered … or doesn’t. A few things are consistently worth discussing:

Who will actually be delivering the work day to day?

Continuity of team matters in transformation programmes. The relationship between client and consultant is a working one, and it functions best when the people involved are consistent, engaged, and genuinely accountable for outcomes.

How does the firm handle things when they don’t go to plan?

Every experienced consulting partner has navigated programmes that hit unexpected complexity. How they talk about those experiences, and what they did about them, is a reasonable indicator of how they’ll behave when your programme encounters its own challenges.

What does a successful outcome look like from their perspective, and does that align with yours?

This sounds like an obvious question. It’s also one that doesn’t get asked often enough, and the answer is revealing.

Rigour at the start makes everything easier

The RFP stage sets the tone for the entire engagement. Programmes that begin with clear scope, honest budgeting, agreed contingency, and aligned expectations tend to run more smoothly; not because nothing goes wrong, but because there’s a solid foundation to return to when it does.

That foundation doesn’t appear automatically. It’s built through the quality of the brief, the depth of the proposal review, and the conversations that happen before contracts are signed. The time invested at this stage pays consistent dividends throughout the programme that follows.