Posted by Jon on 10 September, 2007 under Word play & writing | 
The executive sponsor of a bid that one of our colleagues has been managing circulated a note to the team last week, congratulating them on their work on the proposal that had just been submitted. It started:
“Dead Team,
I just wanted to write to thank you…”
Needless to say, the correction followed close behind:
“I obviously meant ‘Dear’ and not ‘Dead’”
That said, there are times when you’ve worked up to the wire to get the document together when the original phrase may feel just a tad too close to the truth!
Posted by BJ on 7 September, 2007 under Processes & best practice |
I recently worked with a proposal manager whose proposal effort was behind schedule due to missed commitments by members of her team. She had sent out a mail to the team presenting the current status and stating, “I need you to get your pieces to me as soon as possible.” After reading this mail I explained to her that this situation – that being that she was going to have to miss the deadline and/or submit a poor quality response – called for a much more direct approach, and that it was time for her to “swing the bat” (with borrowed authority, in this case from her manager and the CEO, behind it.)
I subsequently wrote a note which I termed a “in no uncertain terms” mail. She tailored this to her project and team and sent it out.
I know many of you face similar challenges in getting team members to meet their deliverable dates, so I’m providing the text of my mail.
The text of my “In no uncertain terms” mail:
Attention all.We are now in serious jeopardy missing the deadline and/or submitting an extremely poor quality proposal due to the significant number of deliverables that are several days past due.
At this point it is highly probable that the response we submit:
- Will present us as being less than competent professionals
- Will not clearly present our solution
- Will not have a clear strategic message
- Will contain incorrect or inaccurate information
- Will be poorly written and contain mistakes
- Will appear to have been written by multiple people rather than one
Missing the deadlines to which you have committed has directly impacted the overall quality of the response we are developing.
These delays have now necessitated reducing the time available for editing, reviewing, edit/review recovery, printing, assembly, quality control checks, and shipping safeguards—all of which are critical to ensuring the quality of our response.
Failure to address this immediately will cause us to have to miss the deadline as submitting a poor quality document as described above presents too great a risk to our company.
Your attention to this is required immediately. Please contact me to provide status of your piece and to discuss how we will ensure your deliverables are successfully met.
Respectfully,
A warning: This note is intended to be used when the project is really off the rails, not for merely reminding people if they are slightly late. Also, this mail needs to be followed up and it will be ineffective if you let team members “call your bluff”.
The good news in this particular case is that this client’s manager and her CEO both followed up.
The CEO’s mail to the team stated, “We ALL agreed that we were going to bid on this project. Bidding does not mean we will forward a half-assed proposal that we are not proud of. I expect everyone to pull their own weigh and ensure that we meet our deliverables. If anyone disagrees with this message or feels they can not comply please let me know immediately.
Posted by Jon on 5 September, 2007 under Musings |
Some slightly bizarre results in the latest cut of data in the 2007 Proposals & Business Development survey. (Still time to add in your views, if you haven’t done so already). Barbara Esmedina, Chief Survey Goddess, pulled off the results for the groups earning the most (>$400k per year) and least (<$30k annually).
So, the highest earners are the most experienced, most respected and happiest, with the greatest involvement in professional associations such as APMP. Right? Err, no. Of this top-earning group, only a third claim to be respected. Half “hate their job”.
At least they can take comfort from the fact that a third of them don’t personally work directly on proposals or RFPs, presumably leaving that to their minions! So, perhaps it’s no wonder that only over 80% aren’t APMP members.
Yet at the lower earnings end, over half of respondents feel that their job is somewhat or very well-respected. 57% like or love their job. Hey, it must tough at the top!
Now, the sample sizes are pretty small in both cases, I wonder whether one or two folks haven’t answered the questions as accurately as they might have done. And the data is slightly distorted by geography (in that a quarter of the lower earners are in continents where living costs – and hence salaries – are somewhat lower). So although these findings come with a strong health warning, there’s some thought-provoking data nonetheless.
Now, over $400k per year? Time to raise my consulting and training rates. (Joke!)
Posted by Jon on 4 September, 2007 under Musings |
Taken from Scott Adams’s wonderful Dilbert blog.
Posted by Jon on 2 September, 2007 under Processes & best practice |
I wondered, as I looked through the data coming in from Barbara’s survey, whether analysing various factors in relation to the size of the proposal organisation would throw up any interesting data. Some 67% of survey respondents work in small proposal teams (for this analysis, meaning five or fewer staff); 20% are in medium-sized proposal organisations (6-10 staff), the remaining 13% in large proposal centres (over ten staff).
I’m fascinated, having done the analysis, as much by the similarities as the differences. First off, there’s little difference in team sizes between industry sectors – Healthcare would appear to have slightly smaller teams on average that Financial or Technology (IT/Telecoms) companies, but there’s really not much in it. Job satisfaction, too, seems to be consistent across teams of all sizes, with around 70% answering generally positively about their job.
Why larger teams? Average response times don’t vary wildly by team size, but average document size does: 57% of small teams are typically submitting proposals of less than 100 pages, compared to only 31% of large teams. Complexity, quality, efficiency and volume may all be factors that are at play.
Bigger proposal centres are also far more likely to have outsourced printing: just over 25%, compared to 15% of medium-sized proposal teams and 10% of smaller teams. (Mimeo are running well ahead of Kinko’s as the outsourced partner of choice, by a factor of about three-to-one). This could suggests that the smaller teams are operating in “all hands to the pump” mode, with little time to step back and look at process – even if print outsourcing might be a huge help.
But perhaps the most interesting factor for me was the degree of fragmentation of proposal teams within the largest organisations. Nearly half of proposal folks in organisations of more than 50,000 employees are working in small proposal organisations of five or fewer staff. One hopes that there’s a degree of co-ordination between the multiple proposal centres that must be scattered around their businesses, but experience suggests that this is too rarely the case, even if engineering appropriate dialogue can lead to huge benefits.
Meanwhile (and part of the excuse for publishing this week’s survey findings a little later than usual!), BJ and I have been finalising our presentations for the UKAPMP conference, at which we’re both platform speakers. Well worth a look at the conference details, if you’re in or can get to Europe for the event on 10-11 October. Richard Jenkins, one of our Strategic Proposals team, has done a fantastic job pulling the speaker programme together.
I’m off to Singapore at the end of this week. I know from our site stats that we have a few readers there – if any of you fancies a coffee, it’s always fun to meet new proposal folks and swap stories!
