Posted by Jon on 22 December, 2008 under Musings | 
For our final post before the festive season, I’m going with possibly the most ill-conceived proposal answer I’ve seen recently.
Asked to describe any past work for the client, the bidder replied that they did indeed have an existing relationship. Only, they didn’t paint a picture of the projects they’d delivered, the business benefit the client had derived, the great feedback they’d received. Oh no! See, there was one measure of success that was foremost in the account manager’s mind, and so the answer read:
We have delivered over £1m worth of services to you and this represents a real achievement.
On that note, BJ and I would like to don our party hats and head off for a well-earned blogging break until the start of the new year. Our best wishes to all of you for the festive season.
Posted by BJ on 18 December, 2008 under Word play & writing |
In the shower this morning (where I, like many people, get my best ideas!) I found myself thinking of the song The Twelve Days of Christmas and wondering what the words would be if this was related to proposals. I suspect most of you know the tune and most of the words (or at least up to day three or four anyway.).
I thought I’d try to come up with my version of twelve gifts related to proposals. I almost immediately had the first one which I’ll share with you in a moment.
As I worked on the next one, it occurred to me that asking our readers to provide their ideas for proposal ‘gifts’ would be a much better way of coming up with the twelve gifts.
So, I’ll kick it off and I’ll look for you to send us your ideas.
Ready? Okay, here goes…
“On the first day of the engagement my mentor gave to me…
“An assessment of our proposal quality.”
(I do apologize if you now have this song stuck in your head for the rest of the day. But hey, why should I be the only one, right?)
Posted by Jon on 16 December, 2008 under APMP & accreditation |
Thanks to a couple of readers for their emails in response to my previous post. Both discussed the challenges that may prevent some of those who’ve passed the APMP Foundation Level exam from moving on to the next level, Practitioner.John Chennells works in Logica’s UK Proposal Centre. He attended a Practitioner workshop we ran at the recent UKAPMP annual conference, and wrote:
With impeccable timing, your latest posting appeared the other day just as I was completing the first draft of my Practitioner level submission. Everything you said about it in the workshop at Stansted is true – it has taken an incredibly long time to complete.
It’s particularly difficult to make sure you cover all the mandatory points, and make anything more than unsubstantiated statements, in just a couple of hundred words. And at times the answers required do seem to get very repetitive – I found I kept harking back to the same half-dozen examples. I suspect the rate of uptake would be rather greater if there were (say) twenty questions, but you could write perhaps 400 words on each. The answers might be a bit more interesting for the reader then, too.
Meanwhile, Sally Buttery (UK Bid Team Manager for Siemens Enterprise Communications) questions the ease of securing organisations’ sponsorship for Practitioner level. She recently passed Foundation Level on one of our courses, but:
Although I could find the time to progress to the next level(s) within APMP, I could not realistically justify the expenditure financially. In recessionary times, training is often the first to fall foul of ‘cost cutting’ and I could not envisage how a practitioner’s or professional accreditation from APMP could aid the company (my employer).
The dilemma APMP faces is that the foundation level is straightforward and achievable by most and many companies are willing to make this investment. However, many employers do want to spend more for the [Practitioner] accreditation which (is seen) to primarily benefit the individual’s objectives, and therefore, RoI is not evident.
That’s an interesting perspective. I’d think that Practitioner should actually be easier to justify internally. After all, Foundation Level tests one’s understanding of best practice, whereas Practitioner tests its application. I see Practitioner as a development process, whereby candidates assess which areas of best practice they currently apply, then fill in the gaps as they work on live deals, then sit the exam. So, done right, there should be a direct Return on Investment for their organisation.
There are some interesting lessons in all of this for APMP, I think. I’ll feed the comments into the Accreditation Steering Group next time it meets.
Posted by BJ on 12 December, 2008 under Musings |
In my opinion, some of the best television programs available in the US are imported from Britain. These include, Faulty Towers, Monty Python, Are You Being Served, Benny Hill, and of course, the Office*, among many, many others. I recently had the pleasure of seeing a new British talk show, Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…**, presented by Elvis Costello.
On his program, Elvis interviews and then plays with singer songwriters. On this particular program, the quest artist was Lou Reed. During the interview process, Lou and Elvis were discussing the process of writing lyrics. Lou commented, and Elvis strongly agreed, that lyrics often just “seem to just come to me” and he had long ago learned to “just let it happen and not interrupt the process.”
I think this is true of writing for proposals. Once you have determined the appropriate strategic position, theme or benefit, you can often let the pen take over and the “good stuff” will flow. Thinking too much about what you are writing or continually revising what you’ve written will ultimately weaken the writing. Next time you write, try letting it “flow” and see what happens.
* The hugely popular “The Office”, created by Ricky Gervais, was originally done in England. Ricky then created an American version. For a recent Top Ten segment on David Letterman, Ricky recently wrote and presented the “The Top Ten Things Americans ask the British.” #1 on his list was, “Why doesn’t England develop its own version of The Office?”
** Spectacle: Elvis Costello with…” is showing on the Sundance Channel (where I live, this is Comcast).
Posted by Jon on 10 December, 2008 under APMP & accreditation, Musings |
It struck me recently that I must have helped a rather large number of people pass their APMP Foundation Level exam since we were endorsed as an APMP Approved Training Organisation a couple of years ago. There are well over a hundred of you out there who’ve passed having attended one of my sessions, which is well over 10% of the total to have attained the qualification.
Now, we’ve never really seen the APMP accreditation scheme as a money-making operation; BJ and I participate in it because we’re passionate about its importance to the profession. If one calculated our investment in accreditation, and weighed that against our continuing efforts to offer training in this area as cost-effectively as possible, the balance sheet would horrify our bank managers. Indeed, we’ve even donated the proceeds of events in the past to the Association’s coffers; I’m willing to be corrected, but I think we were the first to do so.
But we love meeting the range of people who come into our classes – from different industry sectors, from organisations of wildly differing sizes, from clients old and new. And it occurs to me to wonder how these folks fare after the course. I’d welcome any comments on the following, either here or by email:
1. Has Foundation Level proved useful? Has it helped you learn new tricks, provided you with an injection of confidence, made you more credible with your colleagues, helped you gain a pay rise, strengthened your c.v., been useful in gaining a new job?
2. Not that high a proportion of those passing Foundation worldwide have yet moved on to reach Practitioner level. What inhibits them? Is it time, cost, fear of failure, the breadth of the syllabus, lack of the necessary three years’ experience?
Posted by BJ on 8 December, 2008 under Word play & writing |
I recently spoke with a call center representative for the airlines. English was obviously a second language for this person, though he spoke English reasonably well. He helped me make the needed change to my flights and we exchanged pleasantries. His closing comment let me know he had been trained to express that it had been a pleasure to be of service to me when concluding the call.
However, something was definitely lost in translation, as what he said was, “I have had a great time servicing you.”
I had all I could do not to reply, “It was good for me too, guy.”
Posted by Jon on 4 December, 2008 under Processes & best practice, Word play & writing |
How about this for a remarkable piece of writing, from a proposal we reviewed recently:
Detailed biographical details are included in CV’s in Appendix C and in Tables 3a, 3b, 4a, 4b, 4b, and 5 and in Appendix G.
Like, as an evaluator I’m going to bother – rather than just rolling my eyes heavenwards and sighing deeply…? You could be forgiven for imagining that the amount of paper-turning that would be required would turn the proposal into some clever origami model.
Our esteemed colleague Richard Jenkins described one recent proposal as suffering from ‘Appendix-itis’. Sure, there are times when material needs to be moved to an Appendix – most often, if its length would disrupt the flow of your story.
But this should be the exception, rather than the rule – a last resort to be carefully justified each time. And, at the very least, the main answer should include a synopsis of the material that the evaluators would find were they to read the Appendix – ensuring that you get the maximum score whilst recognising that reviewers probably won’t read the detail on their first pass through.
