Laura’s Winning Ideas

“A tournament for computer programmers crowned a champion Thursday. The winner’s secret: avoiding bells and whistles, and asking questions until he knew exactly what the judges wanted his software to do.

From Best of the Business Tech Blog, The Wall Street Journal
By Ben Worthen

Tim Roberts was the winner of $25,000 for his dedication to avoid the usual pitfalls of technical projects: late delivery and/or failure to meet expectations. Poor communication is usually the culprit, sometimes paired with project creep, when new features are added along the way.

Same goes for most projects I can think of. Proposals, projects of all kinds benefit from a clear understanding of the requirements. The winner in this competition spent one hour reading the requirements and then asked “at least 30 questions” before designing his response.

I remember showing a winning proposal to a manager who exclaimed that the proposal seemed
too plain for his oh-so-complicated projects. Actually, the “black box” approach fails more and more often as competitors figure out the wisdom of “making the complex simple to understand.”

Would it help if you could have proposal images and/or audio available to the customer at their convenience?

Below, you can watch a PowerPoint presentation I created for an SMPS meeting several years ago. I can restrict access to the folks whose email addresses I provide, or leave the file open to the public.

The service I’m using here is authorSTREAM. The service is free, so its a good thing to tuck away in your bookmarks.

I’m playing around with some new toys that might be ideal for a proposal. Sketchcast is a new service which allows you to make your own sketch with or without sound. It’s my favorite price: free!

I could see embedding links to several of these in a proposal. Almost like putting Easter Eggs in your document code.

If I were doing this for a real proposal, I’d do several things:

1. Get a graphic sketch board (as low as $50 at Amazon.com) rather than use my mouse to sketch.

2. Have one person sketching and another speaking. It was hard to draw and talk at the same time, but your experience may vary.

3. Use a headset. I was simply using the built-in speaker on my computer. The sound will be louder and clearer with a headset.

Play with it and see what you can do!

Here’s another company’s promo done on Sketchcast, with the founder’s 11 year old son narrating and explaining what his Dad’s company does.

Laura Ewing just showed me a new site to research federal contracts.

http://www.usaspending.gov

Very nice interface. I’ve played around with it a few minutes and easily found contracts for clients and their competitors, as well as which agencies are contracting.

Tuck this one in your bookmarks and backup your bookmarks!

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