The holiday handoff runbook, part 2: the questions we forgot
Follow-up to the holiday handoff runbook. Four prompts we missed the first time — covering portal credentials, unsubmitted addenda, decision-of-last-resort authority, and the quiet bids you forgot you were still on the hook for.
The first runbook covered the obvious things — primary on-call, escalation chain, active bids, portal URLs, what to do about a weekend addendum. Four days after publication, four questions landed in our inbox that the first version did not answer. Here they are, because next year we want the runbook to catch them up front.
1. Who has the portal credentials
Not “where are the credentials.” Who. When the primary on-call is asleep at 11pm and a portal needs a password reset before the deadline, the secondary needs to know which human can approve the reset — not which vault the password lives in. The vault is a tool; the approver is a person with an expectation that they might be paged. If that expectation has not been set, the portal will not be accessed on time.
Add one line per portal: “reset approver: [name], [phone], reachable via [channel].“
2. What addenda landed that have not been acknowledged
Some buyers require you to confirm receipt of an addendum within a window. If the addendum lands on December 23rd at 4pm and nobody acknowledges it before the 28th, the bid can be disqualified on a procedural ground that has nothing to do with content. The first runbook named “check for addenda daily.” It did not specify the acknowledgment step. Add it. Mark every addendum the team has received but not yet clicked acknowledged on as a pre-holiday action item, and close that queue before the 22nd.
3. Who has decision-of-last-resort authority
The thing the first version treated as obvious and is not. If the on-call secondary faces a genuine judgment call on December 29th — a buyer’s portal is down, a deadline is passing, a clarification question with a 24-hour window has landed — they need to know who on the leadership side is authorized to say “withdraw the bid” or “push the deadline.” That person is usually the head of proposals or the commercial lead. Name them in the runbook with a phone number, not a Slack handle. Slack goes unread on holidays. Phones ring.
4. The quiet bids you forgot you were still on the hook for
Every proposal function has three or four bids that are technically still open but have gone quiet — the buyer said “we will be back in touch in January,” or the deadline slipped, or the submission happened in November and the award date is on a holiday. If the buyer does come back — with a clarification, an in-person interview request, a BAFO (best-and-final-offer) notice — the on-call needs to know the bid exists. List the quiet bids on the runbook under “if the buyer reaches out, here is the person who ran capture, here is the last thing we submitted, here is the expected award date.”
We missed this one the first time because nobody was tracking quiet bids as handoff surface. They are. A call from a buyer on December 30th looking for a clarification is lost revenue if the on-call has no idea the bid exists.
What the first runbook got right
Most of it. The first version covered 80% of the handoff. These four are the long tail, and the long tail is where the actual emergencies live — the 90% case is handled by any handoff, the 10% case is what distinguishes a good one.
Keep both runbooks live. The first is the core. This one is the errata. Next year’s version rolls the errata into the core and the new errata replaces this post.
The general principle: the handoff runbook is never finished. It accumulates, like every other artifact in proposal operations, because every December surfaces one more failure mode nobody thought of the previous December. Write it down when you find it. Do not assume you will remember in eleven months.