A proposal team needs more than a list of job titles. It needs people able to do the work, clear authority for the decisions, and a way to choose between competing demands when capacity is limited. Those needs remain whether the team is one person coordinating specialists or a larger professional function.
Use this guide to choose a team arrangement, distinguish coordination from approval, and test whether the resources match the work. The hypothetical case shows how those choices come together when two bids compete for shared resources.
Start with responsibilities, then decide where people sit
Proposal work can draw on writers, coordinators, proposal or bid managers, account/capture leads, technical specialists, commercial reviewers and an authorised business sponsor. Some roles may be combined. Make the responsibilities and decisions visible even when one person combines several roles.
For individual responsibilities and career distinctions, use the bid, proposal and capture role guide. Bid Solutions’ discussion of bid and proposal roles also makes clear that titles and boundaries are not universally agreed. Design around the actual work and business relationships.
Before drawing an organisation chart, list the work that needs ownership:
- Deciding whether to invest in a pursuit and how competing bids are prioritised.
- Understanding the customer, solution and commercial position.
- Obtaining and checking the evidence used in the response.
- Developing answers and coordinating specialist contributions and reviews.
- Approving delivery, price and other commitments within delegated authority.
- Making the final offer decision, with unresolved issues visible.
- Developing staff, maintaining reusable knowledge and improving the function between deadlines.
Then ask where access to customers, specialists, leadership and professional support will be strongest. Reporting lines are one part of the answer; availability and authority are others.
Centralised, embedded or hybrid: make the trade-off explicit
Compare the options against how your business wins work and shares its specialists.
| Arrangement | What to assess before choosing it |
|---|---|
| Centralised proposal function | A shared pool can make professional development, common methods and cross-business staffing easier to organise. It still needs a clear way to prioritise demand and enough access to each business’s customer and technical context. A central queue without decision authority can become an overloaded service desk. |
| People embedded in business units | Close day-to-day contact can help writers and managers understand a unit’s work and stakeholders. Check how they obtain specialist support, cover absences and maintain professional standards. Local reporting alone does not resolve a clash over shared technical or commercial reviewers. |
| Hybrid arrangement | Embedded leads can retain business context while a central pool supplies writing, coordination or specialist capacity. Make allocation, supervision and escalation explicit: agree how to resolve competing instructions from business-unit and functional managers. |
The right choice depends on workload, bid complexity, geography, skill availability and business authority. For a hybrid team, give the shared allocation decisions particular attention.
When one person writes and manages, allow time for both drafting and coordination in the capacity plan. Identify who can provide independent specialist checking and approve the offer.
Give the coordinator access to decisions
Someone can own the response plan without being authorised to approve the solution, staffing or price. Confusing these responsibilities leaves a manager accountable for results they cannot control.
Write down the decision, the person authorised to make it, who supplies the evidence and when escalation becomes necessary. In particular:
- Pursuit investment: who can start, stop or reprioritise work across the portfolio?
- Shared capacity: who can allocate a writer or specialist when two teams request the same time?
- Capability and delivery: who verifies what can actually be provided and the conditions attached?
- Commercial terms: who can approve the proposed price and commitments?
- Final offer: who can authorise submission with the known risks and conditions?
- Professional development: who protects learning, feedback, leave cover and improvement work rather than letting every deadline displace it?
One person may hold more than one authority, depending on the organisation. Record that deliberately. Make sure people understand and can use the decision route, as well as recording it in a matrix.
Worked case: two bids and a shared-resource shortfall
Hypothetical organisation: two business units have embedded bid leads and share two writers, one technical lead and a commercial director. A business sponsor has authority to prioritise pursuits and approve resource trade-offs. The technical lead owns the service evidence; the commercial director owns commercial approval. The sponsor is the final offer authority in this fictional arrangement.
Both bid leads have confirmed their own management availability. The worksheet below examines three shared resources for the same coming week, after existing commitments and non-bid duties have already been allowed for.
| Shared resource | Available hours, requested work and shortfall |
|---|---|
| Two writers combined | 50 hours available. Bid A requests 30 and Bid B requests 28: 58 requested, leaving an 8-hour shortfall if both proceed unchanged. |
| Technical lead | 20 hours available. A needs 14 and B needs 12: 26 requested, leaving a 6-hour shortfall. |
| Commercial director | 10 hours available. A needs 6 and B needs 3: 9 requested, leaving 1 hour unallocated. This does not remove the writing or technical bottlenecks. |
Extra writing support would address only one constraint. The technical lead is also short of time, and the buyer’s deadline stays in place. Put both constraints into the resource decision.
The options the leaders need to decide
The bid leads should present the consequences of doing both, validate the effort estimates and ask which constraints could genuinely change. Options might include authorised additional specialist capacity, a different support arrangement that still meets the requirements, or choosing not to pursue one opportunity. Each option needs its own evidence, availability and cost decision.
In this example, assume the sponsor has reviewed the business case and gives A priority. No additional writing or technical capacity is authorised. The decision is to proceed with A and decline B for this response window, rather than promise both with the known shortfalls. The choice follows the sponsor’s review of these two opportunities.
After allocating A, the shared pool has 20 writing hours, 6 technical hours and 4 commercial hours remaining. B still needs 28 writing and 12 technical hours, so it does not fit the remaining capacity. The remaining commercial hours cannot make up for the writing and technical shortfalls.
A decision-rights record for this team
- Bid leads: provide demand estimates, opportunity context and consequences; maintain accurate status. They recommend, but cannot independently reserve the same shared hours twice.
- Writing lead or designated pool coordinator: confirms available writing skills and hours and implements the authorised allocation. They show any remaining skill or time gap clearly.
- Technical lead: confirms evidence, proposed delivery and technical effort. Unsupported capability remains unresolved until checked.
- Commercial director: assesses and approves commercial commitments within the assigned authority; available review time does not authorise them to alter another person’s technical judgement.
- Sponsor: owns the portfolio trade-off, authorises the selected pursuit and decides what risks or resource changes the business will accept. In this case the sponsor also holds final offer authority.
This is one organisation’s illustrative allocation of authority. Another organisation may delegate these decisions differently; the important point is to make the real arrangement visible.
A complete internal decision note
Decision: prioritise Bid A in the coming week and decline Bid B for this response window. No additional shared capacity is authorised.
Basis: combined demand exceeds the available writer pool by eight hours and the technical lead by six hours. Commercial review has spare capacity, but that does not resolve the other constraints. The sponsor has selected A after reviewing the pursuit case.
Allocation: reserve 30 writing hours, 14 technical hours and six commercial hours for A. The bid lead confirms specific contributors, review slots and escalation contacts with those owners.
Communication and follow-up: Bid B’s lead informs the relevant internal stakeholders through the agreed channel. Record the unserved demand for the next resourcing review. Reopen the decision only if a material assumption changes and the authorised sponsor agrees; do not quietly restart B against the same allocated hours.
The note turns a shortage into a reviewable business decision. It also prevents the professional team from carrying an invisible obligation to finish both responses.
Decide what capacity to build next
Before making a permanent resourcing change, look for patterns across several response windows. Keep a record of:
- Work requested and accepted, including responsibilities and required skills.
- Effort estimated and actually used, with major assumptions and changes.
- Bottlenecks by skill and authority, including delayed approvals or unavailable evidence.
- Work declined or deferred and the decision-maker’s reason.
- Time spent on learning, reusable knowledge, coaching and improvement, alongside live responses.
If writing demand repeatedly exceeds capacity but specialist review is available, extra writing support may be worth investigating. If the recurring constraint is technical decisions, another writer alone will not solve it. If effort is lost to unclear requests or duplicated reviews, a focused working-method improvement may be more useful than adding headcount immediately.
Use actual evidence and a realistic forward view to compare choices. Any business case should include supervision, onboarding and access to specialists, as well as the proposed person’s salary or fee. Use the dated salary guide for market-specific reference points, then build the full employment or contracting cost for your own business case.
Develop the people as well as the response
Give writers and coordinators clear feedback on their work and a way to gain responsibility with supervision. Protect time for source quality, knowledge upkeep and lessons from completed responses. An organisation that allocates every available hour to the next submission should explicitly decide what development and improvement work it is postponing.
The career-entry and development guide contains practice artifacts that can support coaching. Judge progress through observable work and wider responsibility, without treating a team win rate as a complete measure of any individual’s performance.
For a supplier team that needs the operational steps for a specific response, use the DeepRFP response playbook. DeepRFP is Javier’s software business. Use it for the response workflow alongside the organisation and resource choices covered here.
For more of my perspective on the decisions behind good proposal work, developing the people doing it and adapting to AI, join my emails.
