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Internet Marketing and Services Human Edited Web DirectoryArticle Details
Publishing a Proposal Without Losing Your Mind |
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| Date Added: December 28, 2009 03:13:47 PM | |
| Author: Zach | |
| Category: Business & Economy: Publishing Industries | |
Publishing a large proposal can seem an absurdly Herculean endeavor. Conceptualizing, writing, editing, formatting, and printing a 1,500-page document with 120 graphics? In 30 days? Doesn’t seem possible. But it happens all the time. And there’s the rub. Proposal shops (the publishing groups, often embedded in large corporations, that manage these monster productions) are notorious for running staff and subcontractors ragged in a 20-hour-a-day race to publish and deliver these documents on time. The long hours, the rate of burnout, and the level of disorder in these environments are legendary. As a proposal editor and the editorial manager in Computer Sciences Corporation’s (CSC) proposal publishing group for seven years, I oversaw the publication of large, complex, high-quality proposals under extremely tight deadlines. But my team and I managed to avoid the usual angst because we cultivated a structured, organized production environment. You can do it, too. Along with my lessons learned, here’s advice for a saner process from some of the best proposal experts in the business: from CSC, Rhonda Wright, senior manager, and Ginny Furth, proposal coordinator; from Booz Allen Hamilton, Margo Goldman, senior associate, and Carolyn Quinn, associate; and from SM&A, proposal consultant Rachael Neenan. 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 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. |
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