Where’s the Problem? Solving Proposal Vexations
Proposal debrief the morning after a late-nighter:
There was one near-miss in production, and the proposal got delivered on time, but it was a bit tense at the end. The team realized that this near-miss needs attention now, so that the next time, the proposal is safely pushed away from the precipice of missed delivery.
We were training a new proposal team leader. He lamented that production problems were out of his control because he couldn’t change the process used in the print shop.
That was disappointing to hear because he’d overlooked the obvious problem the proposal team was presenting by disrupting the work flow in the print shop.
The proposal team needed to change so their proposals could flow in the existing process rather than whine that the print shop wouldn’t/couldn’t change for them.
The rest of the proposal team was experienced, and they discussed the critical path they’d used. Then, one of the secretaries suggested that they could rearrange three steps to send the document to the Print shop in a different order.
It took just 20 minutes to figure out how to flow the proposals to better match the process in the print shop. The result was that they got the final documents back 40 minutes sooner than usual (an important 40 minutes when the last FedEx drop is in 45 minutes).
Almost always: Fix problems downstream by changing your process. Don’t try to force others to accommodate your process. This is too risky. The less your proposal is dependent on others changing/accommodating you, the better.
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