Laura’s Winning Ideas

In almost every case, I’m a classic Early Adopter. I’ve had palm phones for years, high speed internet connection back when ISDN was lightning fast (and required the home phone number for 3 phone company technicians to keep it up and running.)

However, when I advise senior management on mission critical teams, such as proposal teams, I can be a slow adopter when we talk about the Critical Path. Elasticity is the reason.

The Critical Path includes those responsibilities and tasks of the mission critical project/program necessary to complete the mission. In the case of a proposal team, the critical path is delivery of the proposal by deadline. Every step, process, task and person required for on-time delivery is part of the Critical Path.

Elasticity in a team is critical when more work than you anticipated lands. For instance, a major client issues an amendment to the RFP, 3 days before deadline, and half your response must be changed to meet the new requirements. The only way to meet these emergencies is to divide up the work and delegate to draftees you’ve grabbed in the hallway.

However, if you are using proprietary software, only a handful of folks will be able to pitch in and help. Not good.

I’ve watched one team miss the deadline because they transitioned to Quark and the trained operators didn’t have the time nor capability to bring extra hands up to speed (IF they could have procured additional licenses in time.)

Another horror story was of a team that decided to produce all final proposals in InDesign with the single operator they had. The poor woman had a heart attack during the intense last minute production (I’m not kidding. Ambulance, EMTs, sirens, the whole bit.)

Finally, I was asked to evaluate a recommendation to recruit/train all proposal team members in Framemaker.

Now, it ain’t easy to find qualified and willing proposal team members. Just try to find them with Framemaker skills!

The cost of personnel with these skills was substantially above the scale for their current proposal team members. The salary load after transition would equal the current team plus 3 additional FTEs. The motivation to move to Framemaker was to reduce the burden on the team. In this case, more manpower would be a better answer. Plus, they would be maintaining the necessary elasticity for mission critical projects.

Elasticity is an important attribute for mission critical teams.

P.S. I understand from the Proposal Team Leader for one of the top 5 engineering firms that their transition to InDesign for Windows was just accomplished and they are very pleased. She was trained by me, so I know they didn’t rush into this. I was especially pleased to hear that cutting and pasting from Word docs has been pretty seamless for them, so late contributions can be incorporated without formatting glitches.