Laura’s Winning Ideas

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. Sometimes he wasn’t entirely sure that he wasn’t a wacko of sorts, although certainly he was a pervert. Of that he was certain. Or relatively certain. Being overly certain, he was relatively sure, was what eventually made one an overly certain wacko who was relatively sure. So, he thought, humility was the thing, arranging his words into what he thought would pass for the expressions of a man thinking fondly of his own resume, words devoid of wackiness or perversion, humilty was the thing.
Yes. Yes indeed.

And that, he decided was what he would tell Saunders, whose resume had been grist for the mill, displeased as he was to notice it had been nearly three years since he had updated, even though he was a smug member of the power elite in this conspiratorial Company, one of the league of depressed oppressors who wouldn’t know the lot of the struggling artists if the lot of the struggling artist came up with a great and beleaguered dignity and bit him on his polyester resume.

Yes.

2) Get the basics done before asking for updates:

A big irritation about providing database info is having to look up information and fill in the blanks for data that’s already someplace in the system, just not this place.

We had two ingenious programmers figure out how to connect our database to both the timecard data and the billing data. It provided weekly updates to our system.

• Project Summary Database: Each project which billed over 40 hours automatically created a shell with data from the billing data: Project name, Dates, PM, Location of work: Client technical contact:, Contract amount, total billed to date,etc and from the timecard data, everyone who’d billed 40 hours or more to the project.
• Resume Database: When an individual charged more than 40 hours to a project, a shell with data from the billing database appeared in their resume: Project name, PM, location of work, Contract amount, etc.
• Resume Database: When someone was named PM on a project that billed more than 40 hours, a shell with data from the timecards added a list of people who charged to that project. Often these shells were enough to turn up in searches and allow us to quickly track down the answers we needed to both feed the proposal at hand and update the database. Anytime someone came in to provide updates, they’d see the rest of the shells in their resume and update a few extra at the same time.

An EVP from Dow Chemical toured our group, saw a demo of our databases and bought the system wholesale for their company. When I suggested the key was the methods used to capture and manage the data, he replied that they’d just send out a message and tell everyone to do it and it would be done.

Wow! I thought, must be a real command and control kind of place! …Two years later it was still in mothballs, because “It didn’t work. We need more powerful software.”

Yeah, baby.