Laura’s Winning Ideas

Amy Feldman did a story about tax time in Business Week Magazine and my husband David and I were interviewed for the story.

Vincent Wright posted a note about Scrum project management and pointed to this article about Scrum on Wikipedia. Next time you need to train a new person (on your team or interfacing with your team), this might be helpful.

Scrum is taken from a term in Rugby, a sport similar to Proposal writing.

A scrum project is organized into sprints, just as proposal teams organize around individual proposals.

Team members are divided into Pigs and Chickens:

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. However, while chickens make a contribution, pigs are fully committed.

Chickens include the SMEs, salespeople, management, technical staff and stakeholders in your organization. The pigs are the ones who must get the proposal out the door. Chickens can edit the “Product Backlog” (AKA the proposal storyboards) and provide input to pigs as requested. However, the Pigs are fully committed to the effort and will make the proposal happen.
At the daily status meetings, only pigs are allowed to speak, though chickens may attend. The daily meeting is “time boxed” to 15 minutes, and everyone arrives on time or suffers the team punishment. This meeting is held standing.

The Sprintmaster (aka proposal team leader/proposal manager/proposal coordinator) keeps a Burn Chart, detailing what remains to be done before the end of the sprint (proposal delivery).

Every “sprint” (proposal) is followed by a debrief meeting called a Sprint Retrospective.

When trying to explain what and how we work, having other examples is helpful.

Fortune Magazine published and article about Ram Charan, management consulting guru. The reporter says Ram is peaceful and happy and obviously doing what he was meant to do, though he travels every day and has no home. How much more can any of us ask?

Ram Charan Could Lead Proposals

Proposal work is hard and not too gratifying for the proud. We often toil long hours under great pressure and must submit our work for criticism from less than ideally qualified critics. Yet, we can’t afford to take much credit and discourage our SMEs.

When we win, credit goes to the executives and sometimes the technical professionals. When we lose, folks wonder whether we’ve lost our touch.

However, a specific kind of person is attracted and retained in this profession. We all recognize each other as cut from the same piece of cloth. Others puzzle over why we stay in these pressure cookers, what do we get out of it?

Somehow there is a satisfaction to knowing where to dig for the right questions to ask, even when they aren’t particularly appreciated by the questioned. However, we know these are the questions the selection panel will ask. So, we are obligated to be the thorn, or risk losing to a team more willing to answer the hard questions.

Proposal professionals carry a quiet sense of accomplishment when we hear the echo of our questions being repeated by those with whom we’ve worked. Often our fingerprints are all over an organization in a way many executives can only envy. And sometimes that is just enough.

. . . . Supporting Good People Doing Great Things

Today is a snow day.

We are being pummeled with another 8 to 15 inches of snow today.

Yup. Just in time for Easter Sunday. Won’t the little girls look cute in their new dresses and hats, out in front of a snow bank!

My lawn crocuses are coming up, and now we’ll have to wait awhile before they can be seen above this last dump of snowflakes.

brrrr!