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.”

See if this has happened to you:

A group is assembled which has had experience with the client, and from whom intelligence will be gathered. These are all accomplished professionals, with a competitive nature.

The meeting seems like a squirming pile of puppies. Each person is jockeying to proclaim the most outrageous requirement they’d experienced from this client. As they progress from Pink to Red team reviews, the posturing continues. By the time you are rehearsing for Orals, it is obvious no one is reading the RFP.

Everyone offers advice based on their previous experience, but not tempered by the current RFP. They are all mired in the past, and using their stories to manipulate the future, where they imagine their stories will garner them career advantage. Very little energy is focused on the proposal at hand.

Here’s my advice: When I read an RFP, I’m looking for the differences between previous RFPs and the current RFP. I’m less interested in what the client “has always done” and more interested in the changes they’ve made recently. Ergo, I read the RFP carefully and often.

I’ve never met a client who isn’t trying to improve, prevent previous problems, or tweak the pending procurement. Therefore, looking at the RFP with previous experience is very helpful, as you can identify the changes which will guide you to the winning results. However, advising a proposal team based solely on your previous exposure is less than worthwhile, and may be dangerous.

I once sat through a red team review in which many suggestions were based on prior experience which was not tempered by recent changes in the buying organization. Some of the suggestions were outrageous, some were just plain wrong. One fellow couldn’t get over an experience with the agency that was 6 years old.

The touchy part comes in getting a group of senior folks to read the RFP. You can help by constructing a score sheet based on the RFP, and asking for scores on that sheet.The proposal manager helped this situation by providing score sheets strictly tied to the RFP, allowing comments to be provided on separate sheets, and then distilling the comments on the separate sheets to the few (very few) worthwhile additions to the proposal.

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

I subscribe to The Scout Report, a publication that’s been monitoring the web since 1994 and provides brief descriptions of sites we might otherwise miss.

Here are two with material you can use to help technical professionals improve their ability to win work:

Rhetoric for Engineers
http://www.tcnj.edu/~rgraham/rhetoric/

As a field of study, rhetoric has enjoyed a popular resurgence in at the college level, and when deployed effectively, various rhetorical devices can make any piece of writing much more compelling. Ron Graham has created this site designed to help engineers and “other practical people” with the practice and art of rhetoric. The site includes a summary of basic rhetoric, along with some “Two-Minute Drills”, which are designed to help engineers with developing answers to questions like “Are engineers made or born?” and “Define ‘reliability’”. Visitors can also look over the site’s complete contents via an interactive guide which covers everything from abstraction to workplace distractions. [KMG]

Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students
http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/

Crafting meaningful and articulate lab presentations and correspondence can be difficult for anyone, including engineers and other scientists. This particular set of resources is deigned to teach engineering and science students about creating and writing materials such as resumes, formal laboratory reports, presentation slides, and so on. The guidelines are gathered into several different sections, including “Introduction”, “Presentations”, “Correspondence”, and “Formal Reports”. There is material for instructors here as well, and the offerings include pieces on the design
of writing assignments, the interactive teaching of writing, and the evaluation of writing assignments.  Finally, the site also contains a number of writing exercises on grammar, punctuation, and word usage. [KMG]

From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2008.
http://scout.wisc.edu/

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