Stewart McCure

Writer, performer, management consultant

England

An Australian living in London.  A self-employed training consultant to the global health care industry.  A producer, director and performer of improv comedy.  A trustee of an adult education charity in West London.  A writer and occaisional blogger

 

 

A Decent Proposal

May 19, 2011  /  Stewart McCure

I've spent much of the last week grinding out a proposal for a large project.  Often I find writing the document to be harder work than actually delivering the project.  There appear to be possible three explanations for this: -
  1. Parkinson's Law.  After an extremely busy stretch my time is freer and so a task that would otherwise have been properly completed in hours expanded to take days
  2. Big Projects need Big Documents.  The job is unquestionably large and quite complicated (multimarket, potentially requiring multilingual delivery, etc).  Ironically, it's the simplicity of my approach that's got me invited onto the project team yet my instincts are screaming out for a long and complex proposal
  3. The Unseen Audience.  One of the advantages in making a face-to-face presentation is that I know exactly who I'm speaking to.  This sounds obvious but consider the alternative: an emailed PDF (or PPT presentation) will almost certainly be circulated amongst stakeholders who I am yet to meet.  I have no idea of their needs, level of involvement or even their level of written English.  Do they need to understand my background before getting into the detail or are they going to go straight for the costings?
A client once described to me a phenomenon known as 'fear-based slide proliferation': -
When addressing an unknown audience (or one that's scary in some other way) the temptation to add in just one more PowerPoint slide can be irresistible
This is apposite because what I'm describing here is the effect of fear.  Freelancers fall prey to Parkinson's Law because we're terrified of not being busy.  Big projects are a high stakes game.  An unseen audience can seem unknowable.  The impulse to work harder and longer in the face of such things is natural.  My business is built entirely on project work.  I do a relatively small number of high-value projects a year so proposals are a vital part of my workstream.  It just frustrates me that I'm not more efficient at writing them.

But as inevitable as death comes the moment when I have to embrace that unsettlingly liberating feeling that comes as I hit 'send'.

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tags / Be Your Own Brand, Client perception, Global work, Project timlines, Staying motivated, Work patterns