Proposal Tips

Hi everyone -
In preparing for the in-house proposal writing workshop I facilitated for a local service provider this week, and also for our own e-course starting on Wednesday, we prepared another 10 Tips - thought you might find it helpful in your other organizations as, in BC especially, we're all in the midst of proposal frenzy!

Profit is Priority

I just read part of a newsletter from "By Monday" and one of the paragraphs resonated with me so I'll share it with you:

Profit is Priority

Prioritize tasks that maximize the bottom line.

Everything in your job description is important, but not everything is equally important. You have to meet deadlines, and you have to be conscious of how your completion of tasks affects your co-workers. But keep in mind that the most important things you do are the things that bring in the most profit.

Juggling Multiple Projects

Within our team, as all of you know, we're ALWAYS juggling multiple projects. However, if you're in the office the week before I leave for an extended overseas trip, you'll be familiar with the mad rush to move a month's worth of projects forward concurrently...

So...lessons learned from this:
1. Take a step back and look at due dates within the next 6 weeks
2. Chunk time - block it off and make appointments with key stakeholders (we've had lots of teleconfs, GoToMeetings, and meetings in the office this week)
3. Give every project some attention
4. Communicate what's been done and what needs to be done next
5. Delegate where necessary
6. Strategically decide to set lower priority projects aside
7. Plan for longer days (i.e., realistically, schedules don't work perfectly, so allow some wiggle room)
8. Leave space for cool new opportunities or important requests (we've actually put 4 new certificate programs on our "books" this week - things we'd thought of but wouldn't have chosen right now to focus on except that opportunities came together and it made sense to pursue them)
9. Be kind to each other - in the midst of juggling multiple priorities, mistakes will be made or communication will be misinterpreted. Check in often...and assume positive intentions :-)
10. Laugh...a lot! Without humour, we'd never get through busy times!

Thanks everyone - see you after October 18th!

Looking Ahead to Fall

It's the last day of summer vacation for school kids and the first few days of September have been the beginning of what looks like a very busy fall season for our team - between Deirdre and I we have taken on 3 new contracts in 3 days!

Juggling multiple projects (and/or larger projects with multiple smaller components) requires extra organization and planning. To help us out, Cassie will be creating a dynamic Gantt chart (which we'll likely house in our project update) to anchor key milestones for projects and see, at a glance, where we need to focus our energy for the week.

If you have other scheduling/organization/project tracking tools that keep you on track, please let us know. This is an ongoing challenge for independent contractors (like many of you) and for project-based organizations like Life Strategies.