As we promised we would do, I’ve started to type up, sift and sort the (Wow! We certainly got a great response, didn’t we Jon?) cards from the ‘Church’ service held at the recent 2007 Annual APMP Conference.

Once I have these in some kind of presentable order, I’ll post them here. In the meantime, I’d like to share a few that gave me a good chuckle as I was going through them.

My first favorite entry is, “I won’t hire five monkeys.” Second is the dollar that someone put in the “collection” box . It has been added to the Strategic Proposals Employee Motivation Fund and will be (and by the time you’re reading this probably already has been) well spent. And finally there the entry that reads, “Hallelujah, I’m born again!

More to follow. Stay tuned folks.

“Why bother with all of this storyboarding?” an account manager asked me recently. “I much prefer just to get on with things.”

Have you ever bought a set of shelves as a kit from a home furnishings store, ready for self-assembly, I wondered in return? You certainly can build something if you unpack boxes and start bolting stuff together. With good luck, it might even resemble the pristine bookcase you so admired in the store. Sure, it may look a little unsteady on its feet; there may be a few parts left over (”I never quite worked out where that piece was supposed to fit”). You may need to de-construct some sections once you realise that you’ve used the wrong materials. It’ll take you much longer overall. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend that once you’ve finished, you line up your most precious and fragile ornaments on the shelf below your heaviest books.

That’s why they include a set of plans showing how everything should fit together. The same approach applies to proposals. You can just start typing. But it’s really worth mapping out a high-level answer to each RFP question first.

Just don’t take the analogy too far – there’s an art to developing good storyboards that make the team’s life easier, whereas some furniture shop construction plans seem to be designed for use by those with doctorates in engineering. Make your process and documentation too complicated, cumbersome or confusing and your content contributions may just ignore your good work and make things up from scratch anyway!

A friend has recently taken a new job and moved from the commercial world to that of defense contracting and the world of government.

Over dinner he was telling my wife and me how difficult it was for him to deal with the difference in language, as in his new place of work profanity was “commonplace, accepted and all but expected.”

I discussed with him my experiences when I had worked in defense and stated that I had a hard time with what I found to be fairly crude language heard on a daily basis as well. We discussed the fact that many commonly used terms, such as “snafu” and “fubar”*, are borne out of and are commonly accepted terms within military circles and it seem they were not considered offensive.

Then most surprisingly, I came upon a headline in my local paper for an article on weddings the next day using one of these terms. The title - “How to Avoid I Do Snafus’.

As I seem to say quite often these days, “maybe it’s just me” but I just don’t think that’s right.

*For a translation of either term, just ask anyone you know who has served in the armed forces or worked for a defense contractor… or even simpler, just google it.

One of the most useful questions I like to pose in a kick-off meeting is:

What are the risks to submitting a successful proposal on time?

Now, I could write up a pretty comprehensive list myself and simply hand it out. But by asking individual participants to contribute their personal thoughts, it stops being a case of “Jon told us that…”.

Instead, it becomes a case of “We’ve worked out that…” As a result, they’re far more likely to accept that the risk exists, and take ownership of the solutions that we go on to identify together.

I’ve noticed advertisements in the form of what I know to be called, ‘reader boards’ in front of a couple of local shops recently. And both of them are worded in a way that strikes me as a bit odd.

The first sign, in front of a glass company reads:

“Warm up to a new set of vinyl windows.”

Now, living as I do up here in New Hampshire, I can certainly see presenting the benefit of new windows as warmth. My difficulty with this is having read it on an 85º and very humid day; such that I read this while being very hot, sticky and uncomfortable and the last thing I wanted was “warming up” thank you very much.

The second sign, this one in front of an auto parts place reads,

“Spring into a new set of wheels.”

Now, when I read this it strikes me that this should read as, “Spring for a new set of wheels.” I take “springing for” to mean the same as “to shell out (dough)” as my father might have said. As the title suggests, maybe it is just me but the way the sign reads just makes me a bit nuts.

Maybe it’s just me. Or perhaps some of you would have had the same reaction. That then would suggest when working on proposals we need to carefully consider both the concepts we’re presenting and the way in which they are presented…down to each and every little word.

Virtual teams aren’t.

“Teams”, that is.

OK, that may be provocative. And sometimes “needs must”: it’s simply neither logistically feasible nor cost-effective to bring people together for extended periods.

But I’d argue that a virtual proposal team, working at a distance with no face-to-face contact, are always going to suffer if their competitor’s team is co-located in a professional war room for the duration of the proposal effort. And the additional few hundred dollars saved on the bid effort will pale into insignificance compared to the thousands or millions lost when that competitor captures the business.

So if you’re running your proposals remotely, by phone and email, ask yourself whether you’re doing so after careful consideration, for sound business reasons - or rather because “that’s how it’s always been done round here”.

We’ll return to this at a later date, to share a few ideas on how to make teams buzz even if you do have to work at a distance. I’m sure readers would welcome any comments in the meantime on techniques or technologies that have worked for you!

So, Jon. How’s it feel to have delivered your first sermon? Thinking about trading your proposal hat for something taller and fancier? And is it true you’ve taken to wearing robes and vestments while working on proposals?

To those of you who attended ‘Church’ with us in Savannah, thank you so much for joining us.  Jon and I are always amazed and flattered that there are so many of you in attendance at our sessions, especially the ones, like this one, that are scheduled on the last morning of the conference. The pews were literally packed. Several people told us they stayed over just to attend our session. This is, as you can imagine, very flattering. We’ve also heard that some of our fellow presenters refuse to accept a time slot at the same time as ours because they want to be able to attend our session. This too is extremely flattering.

As is probably quite obvious, Jon and I do have a good time with the presentations, both delivering and developing them. And it’s the participation and welcome that our presentations receive from you that make us want to do the next one, and the next one.

We’re already bouncing around ideas for next year’s presentation, and we’d welcome hearing your ideas for future presentations.

It’s so important for a proposal manager to make the right impression with a team from the outset. Turn up late, flustered and unprepared to the kick-off meeting, and you might struggle subsequently to establish an air of professionalism and credibility.

From the participants’ perspective, the kick-off is about understanding the opportunity, the process – and their role in it. From a proposal manager’s point-of-view, the sub-text is more:

“I need you all to be prepared to follow me into battle.”

As a very left-handed person, I was very pleased to read the following two bit of information.

Charles Sander Pierce, the founder of semiotics and pragmatism, was an accomplished mathematician, astronomer, and logician. This visionary lefty is widely regarded as an innovator in many fields, especially the methodology of research and the philosophy of science.

Dr. Alan Searleman, of St. Lawrence University in New York, found that people who were “true left-handers”, who did everything on their left side, from kicking a football to picking up a glass of water, scored one third higher on vocabulary tests and twice as well on problem solving tasks.

How cool is that, right?

Then I read that there is only one species on Earth that is left-hand dominant. The Gorilla.

(And no Jon,  I don’t know what ‘semiotics’ is either.)

Thanks to a friend for sharing her favourite proposal proofreading error… in which a colleague relying on their computer’s spellcheck had inevitably failed to pick up on the rather significant difference between the words ‘like’ and ‘lie’.

As in:

“We always lie to satisfy our customers.”