Addressing Problems and Corrective Action Requirements
Even the smallest requirements within a construction RFP need your full attention. Admitting struggles or battles is never easy! Unfortunately, the construction industry loves to pull it out of us by asking us to provide problems and corrective actions from our previous experience. Don’t sweat it – Meridian West has an effective approach to addressing this requirement and feeling confident about it.
When the government or project owners require inclusion of “Problems and Corrective Actions” regarding past performance experience in the RFP submittal or evaluation criteria, they are looking for a description of a significant problem or unique challenge and the corrective action the contractor took to mitigate the problem.
For more information about understanding submission and evaluation criteria of an RFP, check out this blog post!
Contractors are often hesitant to want to address having problems or issues with their project, thinking it’s showing weakness, but what owners are actually looking for and evaluating, is how you approached and resolved them. The key to addressing these criteria is choosing an applicable problem or unique challenge to highlight, explain your corrective action and its effectiveness, and demonstrate how you’ve implemented the preventative action for future work.
When providing information regarding the problem or issue during the performance of your project, be sure to provide extensive specification details, how the problem was uncovered, as well as how the problem affected scope and/or safety of the overall project.
Explain Your Corrective Action and the Processes
When addressing your corrective actions be sure to provide detail on how you solved the problem and the processes you used. For example, what materials did you use, what steps did you take, who oversaw the process and how long did it take.
Verification of Effectiveness
An effective problem-solving process isn’t complete without verifying the effectiveness of the corrective action taken. Summarize the ways the corrective action was successful, include how the problem and corrective action affected the overall project budget and schedule.
Preventative Action
Owners and evaluators are interested in how you implement the corrective actions in the future to prevent recurrence of the same problems. In our proposal management process we like to call this Preventative Action. Describe how your future processes changed because of this problem, resulting in effective value engineering.
LPTA vs. Best Value
Should you include this type of information if it’s not required by the RFP? Our opinion….it depends. How is that for an answer? If the proposal evaluation process is LPTA and there is a strict page limit that doesn’t allow for much information than we typically don’t include a big description of the problems and corrective actions for each contract or project. However, if the evaluation process is Best Value or there is no page limit requirements, the description can be useful and potentially add quality or relevance to your past performance section.
Pro Tip: Do not include or show signs of the same problem occurring more than once in your past performance section. Running into the same problem multiple times can be an indicator for the government or project owners that there is a lack of competent resources available to properly implement previous corrective actions, and the contractor is moving from problem to problem not having time to implement preventative action ahead of time.
Contact Meridian West today to help you with all the other minor requirements that need an effective approach in your proposal submission.
