Expectations and Team Responsibilities
Together the project team will leverage their strengths, talents, and expertise. As a result of their efforts, the goal is to deliver consistent, complete, and compelling proposal content. The OPL, with assistance from the Marketing Lead, is responsible for keeping the team engaged and accountable for target deadlines. A few activities that can facilitate collaboration include:
Storyboarding
Individual or group storyboarding sessions are helpful when working through narratives. During these sessions, you get to decide what you’re going to write about before you start writing, so you have structure and a firm grasp on the topic at hand.
Micro-meetings
Brainstorming sessions allow for focused conversation about a specific topic. Smaller groups can help the conversation stay targeted and yields positive results because it sharpens the group’s focus and attention.
Interactive Reviews
Interactive review sessions between drafts allow the team to review comments as a group. These meetings aim to get everyone on the same page about the proposal’s development and provide an opportunity to incorporate significant edits with everyone’s buy-in in real-time.
Driving the proposal schedule
One of the most critical aspects of planning and scheduling is to develop baseline standards of productivity and success. Without setting a plan in place with specific milestones defined by completion dates, you won’t know if you are meeting goals. In addition, the OPL and Marketing lead is responsible for maintaining team accountability. Adhering to the set schedule and communicating consistently about status allows the team to spend adequate time creating client-centric material and reviewing content to produce a high-quality submittal.
Why this matters?
Production problems are common—printers jam, internet issues, and so on. These problems are easy to correct, as long as the schedule has allowed sufficient time to do so. A well-designed proposal schedule will distribute work as evenly as possible across available days. Taking the time to develop an effective plan at the beginning of the process and adhering to it will save a lot of time and alleviate stress later on.