Laura's Winning Ideas

Scary news today about a security breach by a contractor handling sensitive information for a client.

The SAIC employee’s car, a 2003 Honda Civic, was parked in a garage that housed many luxury cars, “yet the thief or thieves, who went to great effort to avoid security, did not break into any of the luxury cars in the garage, targeting instead the relatively inexpensive car containing the confidential data.”

Industrial espionage is a real threat, and proposal teams are in the cross hairs because they handle time-sensitve and critical mission-sensitive information every day. Don’t get casual about the confidential nature of your information.

These incidents should be used by proposal managers to tune up everyone’s awareness of the importance of security for all your proposal information.

Have a brainstorming session to discuss what might be a security breach for your group, and talk about how to tighten it up a bit.

Here’s a few ideas to consider:

1) Back in the dark ages, proposal teams had to create their own backups and decide how and where to store them. Today, you can count on your IT department automatically doing this for you. However you should ask about your backup procedure. In one firm, I discovered that the IT department had the members of the proposal team on a lower priority backup schedule. Once a week is not nearly often enough for a proposal team.

Since the team wasn’t considered executive staff, their computers weren’t flagged as being more mission critical than the Marketing VP. I’m prejudice, but everyone handling a proposal due in 30 days, for serious money, are more critical than someone handling the color of the new logo.

2) Laptops. How do you manage these?

What is your property policy? How and where can they be used? Does everyone know how to distinguish a secure internet connection from an insecure internet connection? Invite IT in for a brown bag session, and buy their lunch to show you how to stay safe on-line.

3) Fax machines. I hate ‘em because they are almost completely insecure. A seven year old can set up an intercept on a fax machine undetected. If you must use one, make sure it is the busiest machine you can find, so someone would have to pull out your information from all the minuetae being transmitted. Better yet, don’t use them. I only use them for lunch orders.

4) Print shop. Most of the current printers keep a file of every page copied in memory. When I use an outside print shop, I bring some work and sit there during production.  Any misprints I take with me for destruction, rather than let them sit in their trash bins. When we are finished, I stand next to the operator and watch as they delete all our files.

Check your own copy machines and printers and ask IT to help you create a procedure to purge the memory on them if they don’t automatically delete. My printer deletes only when it shuts down, but not otherwise, so during proposal production, it gets rebooted everyday.

5) Email lists. Some of us use emails lists to communicate during proposals. Have you checked these lists lately? Sometimes we fail to notice that someone has left the company, or is no longer in the same department and in a “need to know” status. Clean up your lists, or better yet, make it a policy to delete mailing lists after each proposal and recreate at proposal start.

One of my proposal team members was responsible for the daily backup to tape (I’m REALLY old!) and we talked about the safest place to keep the backup tape. My policy was that the most recent tape had to leave the building each night. He jiggered a cassette tape from a local band, so his backup tape would travel with him undetected. The two greatest talents of proposal professionals are that we are all ingenious and fun. Use it!

Follow your data and you’ll come up with more potential leaks you can address before a problem arises. Stay Safe out there!

Much is being published about the life and work of Steve Jobs. After reading Walter Issacson’s book Steve Jobs, I have some notes that apply to our work. These may protect you from the managers who will read this book and decide that they too have attributes of Steve Jobs that they want to unleash.

“This is Crap”

Steve Jobs reacted in extremes. Ideas presented to him were either vilified or worshiped. Often ideas were dismissed, only to appear again later, but now as Steve’s idea and insight.

Genius doesn’t react well to surprises. And in my experience neither do mere mortals. Nothing in a proposal should be a surprise. EVER.

Most often, we are working to respond exactly to the requirements of an RFP. But sometimes the RFP is so far from what the client should be doing, that our firm wants to propose an entirely different idea. Here’s how to win in this circumstance:

One of our clients was well served by a team of engineers who’d been working with their facility for years. Corporate HQ wrote an RFP for a project that each of their plants would need. But our engineers had been talking to their customers at the local plant about a different approach. They believed by combining efforts among several of these types of projects they could save their customer money. They recommended creating a database that would be used for all these types of projects, instead of repeating work and collecting the data from scratch each time.

They wanted to respond to the RFP with a proposal that offered a completely different approach, and cost quite a bit more.

Here’s how I helped them win: We broke the RFP down into storyboards, and outlined the recommended approach. As we reviewed the storyboards, for each one, I asked, “Who spoke with the customer about this and when? Do you need to refresh their memory about this topic?” These guys were good. With over 20 elements outlined on the storyboards, they’d discussed almost every single item. Only one idea they were putting in the proposal they had just come up with. Immediately they made an appointment to get out there and cover this new idea with the customer.

When the proposal arrived, nothing in it was a surprise. The customers used the proposal to defend the decision to spend 3X the budgeted amount on our approach.

Anyone else would have said, “This is Crap.”

“What Do You Do Here?”

Junior folks at Apple avoided riding the elevator with Jobs. They were terrified that he would ask them questions, the scariest one being, “What do you do here?” A misstep could mean the end of your job.

I grind away at proposal teams that they should always know exactly what they are doing that makes a difference to the bottom line. If you don’t know, you ain’t making a difference. You are just overhead.

“We won 18 of the last 20 proposals I supported.”

“We won $xxx million last quarter from new clients.”

“We NOGOed the xxxxxxxx project that Lockheed Martin is losing money on.”

Avoid telling executives that you saved money. You can’t grow a company by cutting expenses. If you don’t know, track your progress and figure out where you can make a difference and focus on improving that. Hurry up. The book is out and your own Steve Jobs wannabe will soon be walking your halls.

P.S. I greatly admire Steve Jobs. I came late to being an Apple Fanboy, but I now have 5 Apple products I wouldn’t want to live without. And I get it. I’ve worked with Genius, and it ain’t patient, deliberate or diplomatic. The adrenaline Geniuses run on keep them high as a kite and to try to tether them to the mortal realm is folly. Our jobs are “Supporting Good People Doing Great Things” and we’re pretty smart and can invent ways to capture their Genius to translate for customers. And the ride is the best time of our lives.

A perennial challenge is how to keep the team on schedule so your production can proceed professionally.

The last minute scramble to throw things together and get it out the door is nonsense. It will cost you contracts you should have won. I always say the most expensive proposal is one that didn’t win. But really, the most expensive proposal is one that didn’t win because it never got reviewed because it was late or non-compliant and was tossed out before the reviewers saw it. (How ’bout the time the RFP specified that every page be numbered, but someone’s 11×17 z-fold wasn’t, and it got tossed out by the compliance clerk?)

How do you get everyone’s cooperation to stay on schedule?

Tell a Story

Storytelling

Never let a teaching moment slip by. Broadcast stories about your near misses and heroic saves that were possible because the schedule was met by the technical staff.

• When a competitor’s proposal was not accepted because the team stepped off the elevator on the wrong floor with less than one minute to delivery deadline, we made sure everyone in the firm knew about it.
• When a FedEx truck broke down with a proposal inside, and we had to empty a PMs discretionary account to courier a backup copy on the last flight out (at 10 times the usual flight cost), we made sure everyone knew about it. And the story included how lucky we were that the proposal team followed our schedule so that we actually had a) backup copies ready and b) time to get on a plane with the proposal.
• When a proposal was due in a remote corner of West Virginia, and our production schedule includes a step to confirm at least two delivery paths, we found that FedEx doesn’t deliver to that town. Because the schedule was adjusted for this, we prepared for electronic delivery to a Kinko’s in that town, where they could print, bind and courier the proposal on our behalf. When the roads became impassable during a storm, 3 of our esteemed competitors failed to make delivery deadline, but we were on time.
• When a proposal was discovered to have a mistake that under-priced the fixed fee by 18%, which we found while running through our production checklist, we made sure everyone knew about our production checklist saving the day.
• When the client server went down the day before the proposal was due, and didn’t come back up for 3 days, but since you’d accounted for the possibility of their new system backing up, you’d delivered 2 days before deadline and then told everyone in the firm about it.

Don’t assume your technical staff has any idea what you guys do once they turn in their materials. They don’t know and don’t care.

But don’t think they aren’t interested in hearing a good story. They are.

Photo from druzifer.livejournal.com. Druzifer's Journal

This weekend was another turning point for Social Media.

In Texas, months of drought set them up for wildfires throughout the central part of the state. In the end a few lives were lost, hundreds of homes were lost, and we don’t know yet how many pets and livestock perished or were lost.

It was hard to find information yesterday, chaotic earlier today, and now, things seem to be settling into a routine to manage news, evacuations, animals and begin figuring out where to go from here.

Television was worthless. I knew more about what was going on than friends who are social media illiterates in the areas threatened by the wildfires. They were glued to television, and I live in Milwaukee Wisconsin.

A few gals I know (Ruth, Bonnie and Betsy) in Texas  kept the posts flowing on Facebook until pages could get organized to coordinate news of evacuations and the large animal folks could get organized. Others were also posting, re-posting and tweeting to connect information to folks who needed/wanted to know what was going on. I stayed glued to the screen for the last two days.

Hopefully the local authorities were doing a great job on the ground and every person got the information they needed to evacuate or not.

I’m just a rubber-necker, eavesdropping on the crisis, but it seemed obvious that the large animals were overlooked in planning for such an emergency. The wildfires charred acres of ranch land where 70% of the horses in the US live, central Texas. However, evacuation of livestock wasn’t part of the game plan for the strapped emergency responders.

The evacuation of horses and large animals required some innovation which turned out to be self-organized on Facebook and Twitter. It was fascinating to watch, and should be lessons learned for every business uncertain whether they should be on social media and anyone who might be faced with a crisis that requires timely information in order to react appropriately.

What started out as limited options, slowly became organized evacuation.

Traditionally, horses are let loose to fend for themselves in a wildfire. It’s a nasty option. You are uncertain you’ll ever see your horse again, and certain the sensitive creatures will never be the same again. But getting horses into a trailer takes time you can’t afford. And they can out-run cars and trucks, so traditionally it has been the only possible option when fire was headed your direction.

One friend was out of town when her husband got the call to evacuate. He had no choice and let the horses out to fend for themselves. Luckily, by 2AM he got an opportunity for another run home, and he had the chance to catch and trailer out his wife’s favorite horse. By morning, he got another chance to return and corral and trailer out the others.

However, there were at least 12 hours of no options for folks with livestock in the path of the wildfires. But by the end of just 12 hours, folks with ranch land, water, food or trailers were organizing to fetch horses and other livestock in harm’s way. Everything took place in plain view on Facebook and Twitter.

A zoo was evacuated in just a few hours when things started to look dicey.

The right (or maybe “good enough”) equipment arrived and new safe havens were arranged so exotic animals could be moved. Cell phones were helpful, but overwhelmed as the emergency spread. However, a single call was amplified when posted to Facebook looking for “enclosed heavy metal trailers of at least X’ x X’ and able to travel at least XX miles to deliver drugged lion and two drugged tigers. Three additional enclosed trailers able to carry at least XXXX lbs. each for transport of exotic animals in heavy cages.etc. ” (paraphrased from my own memory of the post)

Veterinarians running low on supplies put out the word for replenishment so they could stay in place while volunteers picked up and delivered.

When the wind shifted, a safe haven for 43 evacuated horses faced fires coming their way. In less than 3 hours the horses were on their way again. If you’ve ever watched horses being loaded to trailers in a calm setting, you know loading this many horses in an emergency is a miracle.

I especially loved seeing University of California at Davis Veterinary School piping in. They offered suggestions. “If you must release horses into the wild when evacuation can’t be arranged spray paint your phone number on their side.” I sent this suggestion along to one of my social media illiterates with my insistence that they sign up for Facebook immediately since this ain’t the last of the wildfires in Texas this season.

There were a few moments of levity. Everyone tuned in to one of the several sites serving up radar with fire postings. By using radar, they showed the smoke plumes so folks with respiratory problems could plan their response. Around dusk on Monday, a new large plume showed up on the radar. For a few minutes panicky posts came over asking whether this new area was yet evacuated. Turns out the colonies of free-tail bats come out in swarms each evening. They mass so tightly and in such great numbers, that radar picks them up and they look like a smoke cloud.

Don’t let the lesson be lost. Make sure your company hears about how Social Media got information flowing so people didn’t have to panic, working without enough information. How might this be used by your clients/firm?