Publishing a Proposal Without Losing Your Mind

Article Written By: AtomicInteractive

Rhonda Wright says, Proposal publishing is an art. It has to be, when you re given five days to publish 1,000 pages.” As with any art, what you learn from the masters has to be practiced and then adapted to suit your own needs.

Designate a project coordinator

Want a recipe for disaster? Go lean and bring on one freelance editor to proofread your proposal. Then assume that he can format your proposal, make coffee, and—oh, yeah—organize your production schedule and workflow. An astonishing number of companies operate in exactly this fashion.

A better way? Assign a dedicated project coordinator to oversee your production schedule and publication process end to end. Having someone manage the details of production lets the head honchos like proposal managers focus on their core responsibility: developing a winning proposal strategy. And it lets your production staff edit, design, and format the document without distraction.

Ideally, your coordinator should be a trained proposal specialist who understands the intricacies of an RFP (request for proposal) and can manage a production workforce of 10 to 30. At minimum, he or she should be highly organized, flexible, and accustomed to working under stiff deadlines.

In addition, Margo Goldman says, coordinators have to have the right personality. They need have to have a certain authority, a certain assertiveness. When they say 'no, people need to know that they mean it.” Carolyn Quinn points out that a coordinator also must be able to stay calm in tense situations.” Or as Rachael Neenan puts it, No matter how difficult the situation, you can never blow your stack. Staying professional is so important, because everyone else on the team reacts to you.” In other words, if your proposal coordinator loses it, your whole staff is going to lose it, too.

Add key staff

In addition to a project coordinator, you need two other professionals: an editor and a desktop publisher. The proposal editor will develop a style sheet (sometimes called the wall of truth”) for the proposal and edit the document itself. The desktop publisher will develop a style-based template for the proposal (usually in Microsoft Word), format text, and integrate numerous files into one. The desktop publisher, who should be skilled in graphics software, will also build the figures used in the proposal.

If your proposal is of substantial size (say, over 100 pages), these leads will also oversee the work of other editors and desktop publishers assigned to the effort. Because the leads carry so much responsibility, it doesn t pay to force-fit someone into the job who s not fully qualified. According to Wright, Your leads need to be true experts who know what they re doing. Using people who aren t publishing professionals can be very costly—and can ultimately jeopardize the proposal.”

By the way, you don t think your proposal needs to be edited? Maybe not, if you don t mind your client reading that hunan resources and a pubic key infrastructure are part of your solution.

Schedule production in detail

A production schedule should work backward from the proposal deadline and incorporate time for writing and revising, designing the proposal cover and the template for the text pages, formatting and laying out the copy, and proofreading, holding author and proposal manager reviews, conducting a final quality check, and printing, assembling, boxing, and delivering the proposal.

It s tempting to forgo putting together a schedule because schedules always slip.” But that s exactly why you need one, and why your project coordinator should map out every interim deadline that s required to get from project start to completion. When these deadlines slip, you ll indeed have to reconfigure your schedule. But you ll know clearly where you are and what still must be done to meet your final deadline.

What to do when your schedule is drifting out of control, but the higher-ups don t seem to care? Remind them of the dollars being wasted by the extra hours spent. If somebody decides at the eleventh hour to change the proposal s template,” Wright says, a coordinator can explain that making such a change will take a certain number of hours—at a certain number of dollars per hour. When the bosses do the math, chances are they ll drop the idea.”

Hold standup staff meetings

Getting your team together for just 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the afternoon can save hours of wasted effort that comes from misunderstanding priorities or job specifications. The purpose of a standup? To assess progress against interim deadlines, assign priorities for the day, answer questions, and adjust your schedule as needed to ensure that the project remains on track. The project coordinator should lead the meeting, and all key production staff should attend.

By the way, a standup” meeting means just that—everyone should stand up. Keeping people on their feet nearly guarantees that meetings stay short and focused.

Use progress-tracking logs

Your proposal is 800 pages long, is being written by 23 authors, and is currently divided into 140 separate Microsoft Word files. Do you know where Section II.13.B.iv is?

If you religiously maintain a tracking log, you will. Your log should list every single piece of the document, including the cover, spine, and back cover; the tabs and tables of contents; the cover letter; every text section, broken out by volume, section, and subsection; and all supplemental material, such as appendices and attachments. Your log should track the progress of each piece through each step of the publishing cycle, including writing, editing, formatting, author reviews, and quality checks.

Wright says that she expects her project coordinators to know the status of every single piece of a proposal during every minute of the production cycle.” Her coordinators tracking logs allow them to do so.

One of the additional benefits of this system, says CSC s Ginny Furth, is that it s standardized and used on all the department s proposals. I can hand off a project I m working on to any other coordinator who s been trained in the process,” says Furth. They can keep the project flowing through the evening, so I don t have to be at the office 24 hours a day.”