Posted by BJ under Proposal Panda | 
On my trip to South Africa to present an APMP Foundation Level Accreditation Preparation Workshop and Exam and to act as Master of Ceremonies, Honored guest and presenter at the 2nd Annual South African APMP Conference I picked up Proposal Panda.
He returned to the States with me and he accompanied me to the recent Noreasters Chapter of APMP Annual Symposium. He was glad to see old friends there, many with whom he had visited and shared adventures.
He left the conference with a new friend who is a surfer and skateboarder and he was hoping to get in some skate and wave time before heading to his next host. Watch for the story and pictures on this visit to appear here soon.
Proposal Panda is looking for other proposal groups to visit so if you’d like to act as host, please do let us know (send an email to bj@strategicproposals.com) and will arrange for him to come for a visit. Your only obligation in having him visit with you is to send us a story and pictures afterwards (and to make sure he doesn’t get up to any mischief.)
Posted by BJ under Processes & best practice |
Many of you will be familiar with the surveys that have been conducted previously by our good friend Barbara Esmedina (aka – The Proposal Goddess :-) ). The survey results are always informative and enlightening (and helpful in leveraging funding for salaries, training, resources, process improvements, etc.).
Like any survey, the more people that participate and the more data collected, the more powerful the results. That’s where you, our readers, come in. Please take the time to provide input to this survey. It’s similar to the previous salary surveys, with additional questions to address the 2008-2011 economic climate. The survey will run until the end of the year and we’ll provide highlights here on a regular basis.
We recognize that many of our readers reside outside the US and, as the survey requests input in US dollars, you will need to convert your currency into US dollars prior to providing the data. (You can access a converter here.)
According to Barbara the survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete. Clicking text at the end of the survey will take you to the contacts page to access real-time results. If you want to be notified when reports, presentations or articles from the survey are available, you can sign up to be placed on a mailing list (optional).
As always, the data from the survey is available for free to anyone who wants it and if you submit contact data it will NOT be shared or used for any other purpose.
The link to the survey is here and the survey results can be found here.
Jon and I hope that many of our readers will provide data to this important and very useful survey.
Posted by Jon under APMP & accreditation |
There’s some good news in the offing for those interested in APMP accreditation, as a refresh of the certification scheme is about to take place. We’re particularly pleased to see this: we recognise the strengths of the existing scheme and the hard work that’s gone into making it the definitive qualification for bid and proposal staff worldwide. Yet the syllabus and testing process as they stand feel increasingly creaky – very much a “version 1” – and we’ve been lobbying for some time for it to be revised. It’s a tribute to Rick Harris, APMP’s new executive director, that change is finally on the way so soon after he’s taken up office.
Most people recognise that the current standards are too oriented to larger proposal projects – a bias perhaps reflecting APMP’s heritage in the US federal government and defense markets. The next generation of the competencies has to reflect the skills needed to run proposals successfully in other sectors – such as the commercial and healthcare markets – and around the world.
“Pink teams” reviewing “wall-mounted storyboards”? ‘Capture’ management? Bid budgets for each deal? A requirement at Practitioner level for experience on ‘complex’ bids? There are too many things that simply aren’t appropriate for a scheme that has to appeal to all proposal staff around the world. And there are gaps, too: there’s far too little on leading and motivating the proposal team – or, perhaps, on problem-solving. There’s nothing on the content development process – or on writing great content!
And even once the competencies have been refined, the way in which they’re tested needs real work. There are numerous questions at Foundation level that are ‘controversial’, to say the least. The “PPAQ” form at Practitioner is in dire need of an overhaul – a personal opinion that would tend to be validated by the relatively low number of people who’ve attained this second tier of accreditation. And the language used throughout needs to be less impenetrable, especially for candidates who are not native English speakers: put bluntly, the next iteration of the scheme needs to be far better written.
I’m very much looking forward to feeding in my views to whichever research organisation APMP selects to canvass opinion from proposal teams worldwide. After all, I think I’m right in saying that I’ve delivered APMP Foundation training in more countries around the world than anyone else – sixteen nations across four continents in the past eighteen months alone! I’m willing to providing whatever time it takes to comment in detail on the current competencies, questions or forms – and to contribute (as a member of the APMP steering committee for accreditation, and as an Approved Trainer) to the peer review of any new materials.
We’ll share anything here that we’re able to – including, if we can, anything we learn about how you can contribute your views to the research exercise. In the meantime, we’d welcome your comments on the changes that you’d like to see to the scheme, and we’ll make sure that your input’s drawn to the attention of the relevant folks.
Posted by Jon under Musings, Proposal Guys news |
I’ve been travelling pretty extensively lately, spending four nights at home in the past four weeks, amidst extended work trips to locations including Egypt and Malaysia. In Kuala Lumpur over the weekend prior to running an APMP Foundation course, I browsed Time Out (the listings magazine) looking for somewhere good to eat.
This place sounded fun:
“The best Italian restaurant in Malaysia”, no less. Impressed? I was, until I noted the footnote in small print – ‘as voted by the owner’s mother-in-law’! Now, the humour made me smile, But it’s an interesting illustration of the power of a proof point: something so important in proposals.
Awards won, benchmarking data, comments from clients, quotes from the press or from analyst reports – they all help to bring your story to life. And our research suggests that evidence and references that substantiate your claims are highly prized by evaluators. And, of course, it’s not unknown for companies drawing on analyst reports in their proposals to have commissioned the very research they’re quoting in the first place!
–
PS You might have noticed that our planned summer break ended up being a little longer than planned! Sorry: we’ve been having some interesting technical challenges with the blog database, including a string of scheduled posts that simply didn’t appear. We decided to step back from posting until it was fixed – which it now hopefully is (says he, crossing his fingers!)… Thanks for your patience.
