Writing Business Bids and Proposals For Dummies

Chapter 8

Keeping Your Proposal on Track

IN THIS CHAPTER

Devising a workable proposal development schedule

Developing and managing proposal budgets

Building an effective proposal team

Many people believe proposal management is a lot like project management, and they’re right to an extent. Like projects, proposals have deadlines and milestones. Like major implementation projects, proposals often require you to manage the activities and contributions of a large team of specialists. And, like all major internal or external business projects, proposals can be just as complex, lengthy, resource-sapping, and bottom-line affecting, and can benefit from all the tools that help project managers deliver those projects successfully.

Yet proposal management adds another dimension to the management of a project: Document development and publication. That dimension is a different animal indeed. Proposal projects require scheduling the time of contributors and deadlines for their contributions, making sure all contributors are working off the most current and correct version of the document, establishing the structure of the proposal and associated content (based on either the customer’s preferences or yours), developing the order of that content (from declaring your intention to bid to final presentations to close the business), preparing the media used to display that content (from email to paper to a variety of digital formats), and, to top it all off, packaging and shipping the proposal, ...