Laura’s Winning Ideas

I’ve moved Proposal teams 5 times. Here’s what I learned:

• Proposal teams should be away from staff who would be bothered by noise

Proposal teams get noisier the larger the opportunity. Why? The bigger the contract, the more people involved. As deadlines loom, all tasks approach the finish, everyone needs to communicate with their task team, and so the decibels go up in order to hear each other.

• Proposal teams need to be near the after-hours entrance

Proposal teams work odd hours. If you have a single after-hours entrance, the proposal team needs to be near that entrance as they are coming and going at all hours. One firm put their proposal team at the far end of the building from the only after-hours entrance. They later remodeled and traded the proposal team with another design team to get them on the side of the office nearest the entrance. Not only had they missed late night pizza deliveries, but also critical Fed-Ex weekend deliveries.

• Select insulating rooms to buffer the Proposal team area

One of my clients has their proposal team located on the first floor, just steps to the right of their main entrance. Conference rooms are just past the Proposal team suite, a great buffer from the noise of a proposal team in production.

• Have food nearby

Proposal teams should be able to get to food without wasting time. If your team doesn’t already have a refrigerator nearby, a refrigerator under the counter where the coffee/microwave is will help.

I’ve had a tough quarter.

My husband’s computer failed. Since I’m the geeky one between us, I was the one to get a new computer, and pass mine down to him.

Sounded good to me!

Unfortunately, Windows Vista was recently released, and this was the month that retailers were not allowed to sell XP, only Vista (since then, the retailers have started selling XP again). O.K., so Windows Vista was new, and I wouldn’t have chosen to try it out so soon after launch, but I had no choice. After all, how bad could it be?

Pretty bad. After a few weeks, and many hundreds of dollars in Geek Squad Agents visiting my office, I gave up.

I am grateful the folks at Best Buy agreed to take the computer back so I could buy an iMac.

I’d spent lots of money. Windows Vista didn’t play nicely with anything in my office. The printer, router, software, even my cell phone had to be replaced. The good news was that I was “forced” to buy an iPhone. I’d admired them, but planned to wait some time to see how they worked out for the early adopters. Now I was forced to become an early adopter or buy another model of the Treo I’d already had for two years. Nothing wrong with the Treo, but it was a choice between the same again, or something new and sexy. For a bit more, I bought the iPhone.

The iMac is beginning to be familiar to me. The learning curve has been uneventful. Apples are different but not ornery. And I found out that I can run Microsoft’s XP operating system on my iMac at the same time. That has been seamless. My accounting software and MS Office are all available, as well as the Apple software. I drag and drop files between the two operating systems. Very Cool.

And now I can video conference with my Virtual Assistant in Austin Texas. iMac hooked up my camera and speaker to Skype without me having to figure out anything.

During this same period, my website was hacked. Some perps set up a Banking spoof site, disabled my contact page, and were sending emails trying to lure customers of a Canadian bank to the site. The security folks couldn’t reach me by email (my contact page was hacked so that no messages came to me.) and finally called me at home one Saturday.

Oh yes. And then the software (WordPress) that runs my blog suffered a security breach. At least this issue didn’t cause this blog to fail, but it wrecked havoc with a blog I use for a church group.

I’ve had a tough quarter.

That said, if you tried to contact me from my website, and didn’t hear anything. Please try again. Your message may have been lost in the ether, or maybe some twerp someplace received it and was happy to know I wasn’t on to him . . . yet.

Back to work…