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Proposal Land

Buddy & Me: If We Colour-code the Tabs

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I’ve lost count of the number of times a technical writer or manager has taken a wee break from the proposal grind, only to come back into the office with some insight:

  • A better solution
  • A better communication approach
  • An out-and-out error, previously unnoticed

Sometimes your best buddy is your own subconscious. So give it a chance to work, and some quiet space in which to be heard. If you’re a manager, encourage your team to do the same – by example as well as by exhortation.

And oh yeah: Colour-code the tabs.

 

 

Buddy & Me: What Else Can We Put in a Table?

 

I admit it: I like words. But as a proposal editor, I am often required to cut, delete, remove, and otherwise get rid of extraneous words. Sometimes it’s for clarity. Sometimes it’s for punch. Sometimes it’s to meet a page limit.

I also admit that I sometimes get my head down scrunching text when what’s needed — for clarity, for punch, and for page-limit compliance — is a different approach entirely. I detest contrived graphics and hate tables with paragraphs of text stuffed into them, but a good graphic or table is often the right way to go:

  • If you’re writing, think before you start about graphical and tabular options and save everybody, including you, a lot of aggravation
  • If you’re editing (especially if you’re having to reduce the length), look first for graphical and tabular ways to present information before tackling the words themselves

While we’re on the subject, if the RFP sets minimum font size at anything larger than a 10, respectfully (but immediately) request a change. Text in tables needs to be smaller than the legibility limit for paragraphs. Overly large font negates the get-it-at-a-glance factor that is one of the main values that tables bring.

 

Term: ISO

 

International Organization for Standardization, responsible for defining characteristics of quality regimes (manufacturing and services), and an environmental protection regime.

The organization’s website states that ISO is not an acronym of the organization’s name in any language (and note that the organization’s name in English is not “International Standards Organization”). Instead, “iso” comes from the Greek word “isos,” which means “equal.” Equal to what? They don’t say.

Acronym pronounced by spelling it out.

What Would Seth Do?

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It sharpens everything.

Seth is talking about doing “date-certain” work as a freelancer or as a service business, noting that it should cost more to get it “at 11AM on Tuesday” than  to get it “soon.”

Well, all proposals are date-certain work — aka drop-dead-deadline work — and that fact sure *should* sharpen everything:

  • Focusing us on what matters to the client as we design our solution
  • Reminding us to train and coach newbies so they’re productive sooner
  • Leading us to create more-reliable and, hence, faster processes to draft our response
  • Getting us to accept the “good enough” and to let go of the “perfect”

Of course, we can do that other thing instead, and just throw an unprepared team against an impossible mountain of work and hope for the best. But that actually costs more: in bids lost and in people chewed-up.

Seth would not be impressed.

Related post: The Most Important Thing in RFP Responses

Buddy & Me: We Can’t Bid on This Thing

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We all know about the tension between Sales (Give the client whatever they want! Promise anything!) and Operations (Sell what we already have on the shelf. Sell what we know we can do.). In this encounter, I learned that there can be a similar disconnect between Sales and Contracts, where the former is maybe a little more inclined to hand-waving (Yeah, yeah, they don’t mean that.) and the latter is maybe a little more inclined to anticipatory hand-wringing (IT SAYS WE HAVE TO DO THIS!). Accompanied by a side of hyperventilation.

Everyone brings a useful perspective to proposals. (Well, almost everyone. There was that one guy . . . .) The trick is to give voice to the disagreements in such a way that they’re resolved well:

  • Allowing the company to make a good decision on whether to bid
  • Enabling the team to develop a winning and yet feasible-to-deliver plan if you do decide to bid