A short video blog about the importance of trusting your processes to help you get over unnecessary doubt.
Tag Archives: Business Processes
Writing proposals using OneNote
In most information based businesses there is a need to write proposals when securing opportunities for your organization. Without proposals there is no easy way to get your client and yourself on the same page when it comes to what you are able to do for them for the ultimate success of your project. There are dozens of tools in the world designed to help you write and manage proposals, some small, some massive, but all with grand promises. I’m going to cut through the promises and focus on using a tool that doesn’t make any claims in this space and yet can be highly effective…OneNote.
When crafting proposals there are six steps most proposals go through: formulation, research, costing, editing, packaging, and delivery. OneNote has the capability to help with all these steps to varying degrees with some planning and forethought. As we walk through this, you’ll hear me referring to notebooks, sections, and pages; three standard features in OneNote that if you’re not familiar with you will want to look into some of the other articles I have posted to help lay the groundwork for putting OneNote in action.
Formulation
When crafting a proposal, and yes I do mean crafting because anyone who has been in business for a while can easily tell the difference between a proposal written for them and one that has been pulled from a template and re-purposed, it is critical to gather and organize your thinking in the early stages before beginning the writing. In my proposal solution, I create a OneNote notebook for each proposal I am crafting. At the beginning of the notebook I create a section for each of the six areas (well, I did this once and then use that master notebook as a template for future notebooks to be more productive) and begin capturing the requirements for the proposal in the Formulation section.
By using one page in the section and capturing the requirements and core thinking as individual paragraphs I am able to leverage OneNote’s outlining functionality to not only organize the thoughts structurally but also sequentially. You see, OneNote’s outlining allows you to easily drag and drop paragraphs up and down through the outline structure without having to copy and paste. I find this makes dynamic re-sequencing of the proposal in the formulation stage extremely simple since I can quickly find the most logical path and relationships between the ideas.
An additional part of the formulation stage is the use of boilerplate content. Now I know I mentioned people can sniff out re-purposed proposals, but the use of boilerplate within a proposal for consistent information and structure can be a huge boon to the efficiency of the process. In my proposal notebooks I have a section called just that, Boilerplate, in which I keep all the paragraphs and sections of reusable content as pages in the section. When crafting the proposal if there is something I need to reuse, such as a service description, I can make a copy of the page from the Boilerplate section to the Formulation section with just a couple of clicks. By the time I finish the formulation stage I not only have my new content, but my evergreen information, and a logical order all in one place.
Research
Part of the formulation process includes researching supporting information for my proposals. I’ve found this to be invaluable when it comes to backing up recommendations made in the proposals with industry standards, best practices, and cognitive explanations of processes. Rather than copying and pasting all this information into the Formulation pages, I leverage OneNote’s internal linking capability to create links to supporting information at the point of relevance in the proposal. In this way if I need to look up the reference when writing the draft copy the information is only a click away.
Costing
Cost planning and projection is one of the linchpins of any proposal because honestly if money weren’t going to change hands the majority of this effort wouldn’t be necessary. As part of my process I have embedded into the Costing section of the notebook a page with my Excel planning workbook for generating my proposal cost estimates. The benefit of doing this rather than leaving it out on a share is that the workbook is immediately available and saved in the notebook for reference after the proposal is completed. If there is any question about the figures and pricing, this can be quickly referenced with a couple of clicks.
Editing
Formal proposal writing can be a tedious task at times, with some organizations requiring use of corporately approved proposal templates and others being very loose and free with their structure. I keep several default templates in my Editing section ranging from basic, turnkey service offerings to completely custom and in-depth proposals.
I keep the working copy of the proposal on a page in the Editing section for easy access but also to leverage some of OneNote’s other features. On that same page I place a checklist of tasks needing to be accomplished in the proposal. Since the proposal is a file that isn’t always open, leveraging the task list on the same page makes quick work of knowing where any proposal stands. I also use the surrounding OneNote page as a scratch pad for the writing process, copying and pasting in screen clippings, working through additional ideas, and making notations on the proposal and the process as a whole.
Packaging
Proposals usually don’t stand on their own. I prefer to have the opportunity to not only deliver a written proposal but also a presentation around the proposal content to make sure the concepts contained within are explained clearly and everyone can operate from common ground. I also found a well crafted presentation can provide compelling anecdotal evidence of capabilities and skills to a potential client. The Packaging section includes the links to presentations, cross references to facts from the Research section relevant to the presentation, and notes for use during the delivery. Once the proposal is complete, I also place a copy of the finished document in this section as a backup. A second copy is placed here as a PDF for easy access and as an archival record of the proposal as submitted.
Delivery
OneNote switches gears when it comes to delivery from a tool used to craft the proposal to one tracking the final stages of the proposal process. In the Delivery section I place copies of email exchanges with the client, notes on discussions and clarifications, and revision updates as needed. Additionally here is a checklist of the remaining steps to reaching what is hopefully a successful proposal.
Putting OneNote to use
OneNote is not the perfect tool for this process (there isn’t one contrary to what the sales people out there will tell you of their representative products) but when it comes to out of the box flexibility I’ve found OneNote to offer a set of adaptable functionality well suited to being a strong proposal solution.
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If you or your organization is interested in learning more about how you can put OneNote to work in enhancing your proposal process, drop me a line at art@theideapump.com and lets see what we can do in making your proposal process more productive.
Managing Ideas with Stage Gate Processes
In the business space so many organizations struggle with how to take new ideas from their teams and turn them into actionable plans to benefit the organizations and their customers. Vendors are happy to claim to have the next great solution to the process of idea management, but I suggest these tools are not necessary if you take a simple series of steps to implement a stage gate process to handle receiving new ideas as well as evaluating them prior to developing an implementation plan.
Capture
Ideas happen anywhere. The best ones often happen at the least expected moments…and unfortunately are often lost just as quickly. If you’re looking to gather those diamonds of wisdom and insight, the first stage gate in your process needs to be a way to capture those ideas.
This is a point where determining a good idea from a bad idea is irrelevant. Capture and move on. The question arises though, “don’t I need some sort of ideation solution for this to be efficient?” Nope. If you’ve defined your stage gates properly, all that tool will do is restrict rather than encourage new ideas.
Review
This is when the stage gates come into their own. Each idea needs to be evaluated on it’s own merits, in comparison to other ideas, and to the greater strategic goals driving the organization. Some SGP (stage gate processes) count on voting, scoring, and gamification. All these methods have their value, but personally I have never seen one rise head and shoulders above the others.
Spending time with a good business process consultant or with your team as a whole can help you define the criteria ideas need to be evaluated upon in your organization. Whatever the process you define, test, test, and then test again. Nothing can kill an idea creation process faster than the people contributing to it losing faith.
Feedback
This is the part most SGP fail to take into consideration. Once a person has submitted an idea, so often it disappears into the “black box” of ideas and they never hear anything back on their submission. What may be an extended evaluation process can come across as apathy towards new ideas without feedback on status and evaluation. Defining how you keep your idea creators as part of the idea process can make or break the life span of your solution.
There are a number of additional factors needing consideration in an idea processing solution, but take one thing as a rule right now: new ideas are the lifeblood of any successful organization. Whether innovative or evolutionary, without new ideas organizations will stagnate and fail. Find ways to make your organization a fertile place for new ideas.
Improve Productivity using Multiple Notebooks in Springpad
One of the challenges I have found in personal productivity solutions is a propensity to limit the options I have in how I want to structure the organization of my information. The notebook metaphor so commonly used by productivity tools often follows too closely to their real world counterparts. For some reason, in many cases, the decision was made that when you have a piece of information you put it into a notebook to keep it organized. One notebook. No more, no less. Why?
We are dealing with virtual information here and the constraints of the physical world do not apply. Why can’t something exist in two, three, or more places at once? Recurrently I have found one of the greatest strengths of the Springpad solution is it’s ability to allow springs (notes) to be kept in multiple notebooks. This opens the doors to many possibilities:
- Springs shared between project notebooks and customer notebooks
- Collaborative notebooks and archive notebooks for backing up information
- Using notebooks for process flow of notes
- Combining notebooks and tags for rapid and comprehensive organization of notes
- Sharing of content between private and public notebooks
These are just a few of the ways you can leverage multiple notebooks in Springpad. Here’s a practical example: projects and customers.
If you’re using Springpad for business (one of the ways I use it) you can create notebooks for types of projects and for customers, then assign notes to both for easy access. I have notebooks for major projects going on as well as for key customers as their projects progress. By combining those with tags identifying the project and the customer, I’m able to leverage the notebooks as long as I need for quick reference, then move the notes to long term storage in other notebooks all through just a few clicks.
Productivity is more than cranking widgets. Instead of turning the gears and going in circles, work the pump and things begin to flow. Apply creativity to your tools and you will find that being productive is just a couple of ideas away. Ideas such as multiple notebooks and dynamic organization can make all the difference day to day.
Some Thoughts on Customer Empowerment
We have all heard variants on the quote, “if you give a man a fish he is hungry again in an hour; if you teach him to catch a fish you do him a good turn.” by Anne Isabella Ritchie and use it in the context of the value of educating someone in a skill rather than performing that skill for them. There is little reason to argue with the common logic provided by this phrase, as we have all seen people who cannot do for themselves through a lack of knowledge and experience. Where I challenge this precept is in the approach to the empowerment.
If you have ever had the chance to take a small child fishing, you can relate to the following sequence of events. You take the rod and put a hook on it for them. You bait the hook while they look on squeamishly. You hand the rod to them while not releasing your grip and guide it back slowly, constantly watching to make sure they do not hook themselves or you or anyone else for that matter. You guide them through their first cast and then help them reel it in after the bobber lands three feet in front of them. Finally you are successful in getting the line out and now you wait with them, trying to keep them focused as their patience starts to wear without an immediate strike. Once a fish does bite and you’re able to get it reeled in with their help, you remove the fish from the hook. Dropping it into a bucket for the child, they then spend a little while playing and poking at the fish before either wanting to try again or wanting to wander off to the next thing.
Why explain this? Think about how you teach someone to do something much more complex as an adult. We sit them in training classes, giving them the critical skills to do the key steps in a process. Once they are done, certified, and ready in our eyes we send them off to be successful. Are they? That’s up to them since at that point we have relinquished control of what we can do and how we can help them. There are other analogies such as the first solo time driving but what it comes down to is this: there is more than mechanics that are needed to be learned to be successful.
A successful fisherman not only knows HOW to fish, but WHERE to fish, WHAT to fish for, and WHEN. He’s skilled in understanding the environment, the weather, the fish, the gear, and so much more. How did he get that way?
That fisherman who came home with the trout or tuna didn’t go down to the corner Walmart and buy the Spongebob fishing starter kit. They didn’t take what someone else said was “right” as gospel. They looked, listened, studied, and read. They saw how others fished, how they succeeded and how they failed, and learned. Most importantly, they got up early, put their waders on, and went and stood in the cold water by themselves.
We need to stop treating people as four year olds. Stop baiting the hook for them. Stop guiding their hand when they cast. Don’t drive them to the fishing hole and hand them hot cocoa when they complain they’re cold. We need to be supportive, but strong, and help them stand against the current from the shore; not by holding them up by their waders. We also need to recognize that some will never be successful fishermen and that is ok.
LEGO is one of the most successful toys in the world for what I feel is one core reason. Not that they are simple. Not that they have thousands of different blocks and kits. No, they are successful because with only one basic block type in the beginning they were able to inspire…vision, creativity, adaptability, and problem solving. They provided a structure without presuming what the answer would be. The kits provide you direction and guidance on how to construct one model or toy, but I challenge in the cases where only the directions are followed those toys are quick to return to their box or collect dust on a shelf. It is in those cases where LEGO builders have learned to think “the LEGO way” the models continue to grow and change; challenge and solve over and over again. The same must be said for solution platforms.
A powerful platform is the launching pad for solution after solution ONLY if there are people with the vision and creativity to take what is capable of being done and make it real. Companies must decide if they want to sell their customers model kits, model parts, or open collections of capability.
A model kit such as a Snap-Tite airplane is easy to build; almost foolproof. Once the plane is built, you have a plane. A nice plane, but that’s it. It can’t be a car, or a bus, or anything else. You bought a plane and that’s what you have. A LEGO set includes instructions on how to build the model on the box, but when you’re done if that’s the only thing you ever build you might as well have bought the Snap-Tite model. The long term, success comes from when you understand how those pieces fit together and why you did certain steps to make the model. Those steps, when changed around, now allow for new models to be created. The same applies to solution platforms. Understand not only the what but the why and the how and the solutions you can implement are virtually without end.
As customers we must make sure we are not encouraging our treatment as four year olds. Demanding simplified solutions, turn-key implementations meeting our exacting specifications, or changing core functionality because we cannot leverage our vision and problem solving to come up with solutions all take us down that path. We have to stop kidding ourselves that, even though we had the hook baited for us, the line cast, and the reel turned, we’re “fishing.” We must challenge ourselves to stand in the cold water and try. We must challenge our platform vendors to stand on the shore and help us understand, but not do for us when we can do for ourselves. As customers we should learn where to fish, how to fish, and why to fish…and then cast our lines.
“We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams…” – Arthur O’Shaughnessy
Photo credit: tomswift46 ( Hi Res Images for Sale) / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND
Compliance vs. Commitment
At a conference I attended earlier this year, one of the sessions used the phrase “compliance vs commitment” as it applies to user adoption. This is an excellent way to evaluate your strategies when it comes to getting your user community to “buy in” to the solutions you are implementing. Let’s parallel this example to something else in the real world…broccoli.
Let’s take a child who doesn’t like the vegetable for whatever reason, but you see the value in them eating it you have only two real options. One is to disguise it with something else (cheese is my personal favorite). The second is the parental standby, “You can’t leave the table until you finish your broccoli.” In the second case the offending vegetable may be consumed, but there is no commitment to do so again in the future. Each time becomes an evaluation of the negative effects of not complying with the unwillingness to comply in the first place.
If you look at the other option, disguising the vegetable, now it isn’t perceived as something to be resisted and may even be looked upon as something desirable to have next time. You have encouraged a commitment to the act of eating the broccoli without the negative response enacted if there is non-compliance. Now there are downsides to “sweetening” the meal, but that’s best left for another discussion.
Let’s translate this into solution building. A problem in a business is identified, a procedure is determined as an answer to the problem, and a solution is designed to implement said procedure. The challenge is: does the solution require compliance or commitment?
A solution requiring compliance needs validation measures, tracking components, and notifications when compliance is not met. It is built to manage the exceptions to the process. Dashboards and metrics are all targeted around showing where compliance has failed and remediating the situation.
A solution based on commitment is harder to design but when successful is easier to run. These solutions encourage adherence to the policy by measuring success over failures and recognizing such. There can be a weakness in this model for those are not motivated by positive reinforcement, and as such a combination model may be necessary.
The key to success is to build to both sets of users. Those who will use the system because they have to (compliance) and those who will use it because they want to (commitment.) Take the needs of both classes into consideration when defining and designing a solution and you stand a much greater chance of success.
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