Thursday, July 09, 2009

proposal writing

It's been a bad week for mbh this week. We've missed a number of proposals we'd submitted and with staff either sick or on leave, it's taken all our experience in prioritisation and workload management to make sure we keep supporting our clients to the same extremely high standard they've come to expect. Still for every bad week there tends to be a good one so after a couple of days of reflection, I'm now in the lessons learnt phase of the week. I always tend to learn more from things that go wrong than right.

This week's lessons are around proposal writing and having just finished a proposal 15 minutes ago ( and having committed to maintaining this blog) I thought I'd sign in and write down some random thoughts. After finishing the proposal, I asked my partner to have a read and give me her thoughts. Thankfully, she has far superior intellect than me and her communications degree certainly assists in challenging my arguments. Her comment this time related to the use of the term "hot" when referencing a product that is doing well at the moment. We have a four hour project planning course that takes people through a crash course in critical path analysis and network crashing. This course is very popular at the moment and I referenced this in the proposal as a "hot" product. My partner's challenge was "is this formal enough for a proposal" and my response at the moment is yes for when you are competing in bloody red ocean (which we are when it comes to PM training), one has to differentiate yourself as much as possible. However, as always, the doubts creep in.

Thoughts please, is using the term "hot product" too informal for a business proposal?

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