A past performance library contains past performance write-ups that summarize your organization's experience on different projects. More often than not, you will be asked to reference past performances in your RFP response.

Because of this, you want to make sure that you create an effective past performance library so that you can quickly and effectively pull your experience information into the proposal document without missing a beat: you have plenty of other things you need to worry about - like writing the technical section. You don't want to waste your time with work that can be done upfront, even before any RFP is released.

The trick is to organize your past performance project write-ups by theme. What do I mean by this? Well, the project that you worked on at customer X may need to be tweaked differently to conform to the focus of an RFP. In one instance you may need the past performance description to stress your development methodology; the next, you may need it to show how well you worked with other vendors. In other words, the same past performance is written up multiple times and filed under two different themes: development methodology and collaboration.

For each project, you should locate copies of the individual past performance write-ups in a distinct folder. Within each of these folders there may be one or more write-ups of the same project. Multiple write-ups reflect different themes that were originally created to reflect the needs of a particular proposal. Each past performance file is named according to the project name followed by a dash and a brief theme name that refers to the particular thematic emphasis reflected in the write-up. For example, the file name "Alpha Development - planning and project management" refers to a write-up of the Alpha Development project that emphasizes planning efforts and the strength of the project manager on this project.

In each project folder you should also create a separate file that contains the contractual information for a project in the form of a table. The information to be captured here is summary information that should be appended as a header to your chosen past performance write-up. The combination of the summary table and the write-up give you a complete past performance to include in your proposal. At a minimum, the summary information should be similar to the one in the example table below.

Project Name	Alpha Development
Contract Number	2007-SR-0001-003
Client Name	U.S. Department of Agriculture
Period of Performance	10/1/2006 - 9/30/2007
Client Reference Name	John Doe
Client Reference Title	Director of Special Programs
Client Reference Phone	(555) 555-1212
Client Reference Email	jdoe@usda.gov

As you keep tweaking past performance write-ups to fit new proposal responses, add the tweaked version to that project's past performance folder. After a while, you will find that you can go back and pick just the right flavor for the proposal you are working on. In other words, you can focus on the hard stuff and not sweat the past performance requirement any more.