Proposal Land

Better RFP Responses & Management
 
Proposal Land

Measure Twice . . .

 , 2

 . .  cut once.

So goes the canonical advice to the woodworker. Also the linoleum/carpet installer. And retailer of fabric. And so on. Be sure before you do something you can’t undo.

In Proposal Land we don’t do much cutting in the sense of irrevocable changes, but we do a whack of unnecessary cutting if you count editing. And I do.

Outline twice, edit once.

Every hour we spend in outlining, in validating/vetting outlines, and in consistifying outlines across sections is rewarded by two hours less in high-pressure editing of wildly inconsistent sections and crazed re-writing of same in a vain late-to-need under-the-gun attempt to standardize the presentation where it makes sense. To make this dagnabbed proposal look like it came from a cohesive team.

Do I have stats to back up that claim? Um, no. Good point: Maybe it’s three hours of editing and re-writing time saved.

 

Term: Parking Lot

 ,

In a facilitated meeting, a mechanism for simultaneously acknowledging contentious or tangential issues while sidelining them for later resolution.

In the old days of in-person meetings and flipchart paper, a piece of paper was reserved for parking-lot issues. In the new days of distributed teams and online collaboration tools, it’s worth setting up an equivalent recording mechanism. In effective groups, people are heard and feel/know that they’re heard. Then they don’t keep trying to monopolize the conversation to deal with their problem.

There’s no reason why a permanent parking lot couldn’t be set up on proposals, so that people could record their concerns as they arise.

(If this were a personal blog, I’d comment here that this is similar to an individual acknowledging uncomfortable feelings or unhappy thoughts to themselves and making a plan to address them at the next session with the counselor/therapist/psychologist. Once the subconscious knows it’s heard, it stops beaking-off too.)

 

Building a Brick Wall

 , 2

“…the cognitive and emotional toll of repetitive tasks is real, even if doesn’t leave callouses.
The discipline is to invest one time in getting your workflow right
instead of paying a penalty for poor digital hygiene every single day.”
– Seth’s Blog

As usual, Seth is onto something here. Proposal Land has many repetitive tasks:

  • Completing detailed time sheets that allow someone to estimate workload better next time.
  • Gathering current project data and kudos.
  • Building organization charts and tables and pull-out boxes  that are beautiful and clear.
  • Identifying the nits for the punch list.
  • Fixing the nits from the punch list.
  • Tracking where sections are: in whose hands.
  • Creating an editing control sheet in Excel or equivalent.
  • Formatting documents with defined styles (or without, yikes).
  • Checking every section for spelling and grammatical errors and format/layout funnies.
  • Sorting through endless emails for the ones you really need to see.
  • Printing and assembling documents for review and/or submission.

Most of these involve software tools; all involve workflow. In a schedule-driven environment, it’s easy to let “Just get it done” become our best practice. Instead, Seth argues that we should learn how to make our software tools sing and our workflow hum along.

Hacking your way through something “for now”
belies your commitment to your work and your posture as a professional.
Get the flow right, as if you were hauling bricks.

For the record, I was lousy at engaging with the software and pretty good at doing that vision thing on the process. Seth’s piece is a good reminder that what we do repetitively, we owe ourselves and our teams to do better.

 

No No No Yes Yes Yes

 , 2

Style guides: Every proposal editor loves them, every proposal writer ignores them.

So. What to do?

Pick a few things you want the writers to do, or not to do, and give away the rest. “What are the few?” you ask. These are the first four that I ask for:

  • Active voice not passive
  • Future tense not present
  • First person not third
  • Benefits at the front, not at the end

But I’ve learned not to ask writers the same way I might ask another editor. Now I ask writers like this . . .

 

Term: Style Guide

  1

A set of instructions for writers (and possibly for editors) specifying anything from formatting to punctuation to use of active versus passive voice and other stylistic elements.

Intended to efficiently increase the professionalism of the document; often used in conjunction with a terminology list specific to the opportunity.