Laura’s Winning Ideas

I’ve been doused in Codex and Support Forums for the last two weeks, shaghaiing every acquaintance I know, and begging any experts I could find.

We are just about there. This isn’t the prettiest Blog, but my emphasis has been on making it functional for my work. Pretty will come later. I need a break from trying to be a code dweeb.

Here are the folks I want to thank for helping me come up to speed on Web 2.0

Steve Duncan of Lornitropia

Karen Kreps of NetIngenuity

Sarah Lewis of BloggingExpertise

Bill Austin of Arizona Technology Council

LinkedInBloggers

Here’s a blog that shows how to use Themes effectively. The Everyday Economist is written by a college professor and economist who uses a collection of ruses to make economics clear to the everyday person.

I especially like his series about Jack Diamond, a PIE (Private Investigative Economist) written in the theme of the “Maltese Falcon”.

Your boss will consider this entertaining. But if you have worked with me, you know that much more is going on when themes are used in proposals. The reader retains much more detail about your technology, process, even economic theory, when the information is delivered in a story format.

If you’ve worked with me, you also know that slapping any old silly theme on a proposal won’t do a bit of good and might make you look silly.

I’ve used themes for multi-million dollar contracts and it made all the difference between being short-listed or overlooked. Themes are fabulous tools proposal professionals use to break out of the pack.

Jared Sandberg of the Wall Street Journal, published his column on Bosses Who Fiddle with Employee’s Work Risk Ire, Low Morale. There were examples of executives tweaking presentations and reports at the last minute, focused on the minutea that drives team members to drink.

Anyone who hasn’t been trapped by last minute nonsense changes because an executive thought some tweaking was in order, can be excused.

From the team member’s perspective, this meddling can be eliminated or minimized by distributing storyboards of presentations or proposals to all the likely culprits at the beginning of the project.

I had one fellow who was notorious for ditching proposals at the Red Team Review and bringing proposals to the brink of disaster. (Read on …)

O.K.

So you have software to rip through your RFPs. But the database behind your software determines whether you can use it to win, or just lose faster.

How do you capture the right information for your database? Here’s two suggestions:

1) Make it fun for the SMEs: I assigned my best writer to cajole SMEs into providing the updates we wanted. Some of his attempts I had to edit; like the time he wrote a piece as a pathological killer, with a box of kittens, standing next to the freeway, threatening to tip the box into oncoming traffic, if their updates weren’t returned.

But most were hilarious. In one series he adopted the persona of one famous author (think Hemingway, Faulkner, Whitman) for each message, waxing eloquent about providing the updates we needed. Let me find that example, I have it here someplace…. Ah, yes. Here it is:

Subject: The Fall
Author: George Wilkerson at AUS_PO02
Date: 1/19/96 11:03 AM

George found it nerve wracking to cross the continent electronically just as the network was going down, because he felt that if he was too clever with the uninformed parochial people they might thing he was a wacko or pervert and if he wasn’t clever they might think he was an old grouch, made bitter by a world, which surely, he felt, by certain yardsticks, he was, since he kept asking them to update their resumes, but they never seemed to listen. (Read on …)