Let’s face it: we hate writing proposals. We’re engineers and we want to do what we do best: write code, design great architectures, try out new technologies, stuff like that. Nevertheless proposals are extremely important: no proposal -> no project -> no work -> no pay -> no doughnuts.

So here are my rules for writing a good proposal:

1) Embrace Proposals
Especially in times like these, where every customer seems to be cutting back costs, we should be happy about any request for a proposal that comes in. And with this positive attitude our proposals will get a lot better. The customer is our friend. We need her more desperately than the she needs us.

2) Think win-win.
Don’t be too cheap, don’t be too expensive. Just be fair. Customers are smart – they know if they can trust us or not. Both being too cheap and being too expensive may seem like loose-win or win-loose at first sight, but will lead to a loose-loose situation in the long run. If you’re too cheap, the customers get used to your prices and you won’t enjoy working for them anymore. Being too expensive will lead to unhappy customers, because they won’t trust you and find someone else for the job. We are exchangeable.

3) Don’t just think in terms of man-days.
Simply thinking in terms of man-days is not too bad. If estimated properly the project will cover your costs and maybe leave you some profit on top. But imagine you can finish a complex project in a short amount of time, because you already have this great component you’ve written in a previous project that you can use for this one, too? Ask yourself: how much is it worth? How much would others charge for the same project?

4) Cover your back
Always have someone else check your proposal. Never send a proposal to a customer, no one else has taken a good look at. Ask someone to check the proposal critically, question everything from the concept down to the pricing. The resulting proposal will contain less typos and someone else might find something significant you might have forgotten or overlooked. Maybe someone else will think it’s too cheap, too expensive, lacking detail or whatever.

5) Be complete and be clear
The clearer and the more complete the definition of the deliverables, the less potential for discussions with the customer there’ll be. Not only mention what you will deliver, also mention what you will not deliver. If the proposal is about writing a custom intranet application, be sure to mention that setting up the production and staging environment is not part of the proposal – if, of course, someone else is in charge of that. Sometimes, out of laziness, we write stuff like “standard reporting – 1000$”. The customer will probably have a completely different opinion on what a standard report is than you. Sentences like this have the potential of eating up your profit, because the customer expects you to make him happy. And instead of a CSV export of customer addresses, you find yourself writing a full featured CRM application.

7) Find the pitfalls
Every project contains risks. Think about worst case scenarios and everything that could go wrong during the project – e.g. introducing a new technology you haven’t worked with before. The more risks you find, the more buffer you add to the price. Sometimes it even makes sense to mention the risks and the customer will better understand the pricing.

7) Blurry details, blurry price
If it’s not completely clear what the customer wants and what the desired outcome of the project will be, you’re walking on thin ice with a proposal. In that case it’s often better to name ballpark numbers and ranges instead of a fixed price.

Is there anything I’ve forgotten? Let me know and leave a comment – I’ll appreciate it.

Alex

I spend about one hour a day commuting between my office and my home by car. During drive-time I used to listen to the radio a lot. Someday the flooding of air time with commercials drove me nuts, so I decided to change something about that. After having spent some time with podcasts I found out that audiobooks are the better alternative for me: they are professionally produced,  you can read the reviews on them on amazon before you buy them and they usually - when selected wisely - contain less crap than some podcasts (I am a podcaster myself (www.de-lite.de), and I’m sure many people consider my productions crap, too). The downside is - audiobooks are not free

Anyway - just recently I downloaded and listened to “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity ” by David Allen, a book everybody I know obviously had already read, except for me. When I first heard of GTD a couple of years ago, what first came to my mind was some kind of car, a Gran Turismo with a Diesel engine or something like that. Then I learned it was a methodology for self management. Some people I know claim to be using GTD as a method for self-management. Now, looking at some of their desktops (both digital and analog) I know they aren’t.

Many poeple misunderstand GTD simply as using a specific digital tool to store and manage all their todos. In fact it is more of a methodology or even a philosophy on how to organize both your professional and private life. And the toolset for GTD can vary from person to person. In order to be doing GTD of course you need tools, but those can be completely analogue. A printed calendar, a stack of paper, a pen and a bunch of file folders will suffice for some people if used properly.

So what is this GTD thing all about? I’ll try to outline the basic steps of the methodology in my own humble words (and probably missing a lot of points - sorry in advance!):

1) Collect

• collect your thoughts, what’s bothering you at the moment, get it all out of your brain and transfer it to a physical system (e.g. a sheet of paper). When doing this for the first time, it will probably take you hours to finish that process. The good news is that once you’ve got all of your projects and tasks together, adding the additional stuff that pops up each day won’t cost you a lot of time
• stuff like email does not need to be collected. It’s already stored in your inbox. It just has to be processed - and that’s easier than you might think. Before I started following the rules hundreds of emails were lurking around in my inbox.
• the aim is to free your “psychic RAM” from all that’s in there. This will in turn free a lot of energy and take away stress from you. “It’s a lot easier to relax when you know what you’re NOT doing at the moment” is a proverb David Allen uses a lot. And as I experienced this is so true.

2) Process

• look at everything that you’ve collected and decide what you have to do about it
• some of the items are actionable and won’t take longer than two minutes, e.g. “answering that email” or suchlike. Do those immediately and get rid of them
• in case the item is not actionable, consider if it might be actionable someday maybe -> put those on a separate list
• in case the item is not actionable, consider if it might be worth keeping -> throw it away if not, otherwise file it

3) Organize

• assign the actionable items to projects, groupe them by context (Telephone, Office, Home, En route), project, time and energy needed
• if an action needs to be processed on a specific point of time or day in the future, add a reminder to your calendar
• by the way: projects are things where more than one action is needed to accomplish them.

4) Review

• Review your lists every day
• look into your calendar first thing in the morning, so that you know what definitely has to done that day
• Every week reserve about two hours time for reviewing and rethinking your projects, lists, tasks and thoughts from different angles (also the big picture)

5) Do

from the list of actions chose the best one to be done next. This can vary depending on:

• the context: are you online? have you got access to a phone? are you in your car for making errands? etc.
• time available: if you’ve got a ten minutes time slot before a meeting, choose a task you can finish within that amount of time
• energy: if you’re tired, choose a no-brainer, otherwise something more sophisticated.

The audiobook cost me 30 bucks and it was one of my best investments ever. I’ve been following the rules for a week now and my impression is, it seems to be working fine for me. For the first time in years the number of emails in my inbox is 0, NULL, zip, nada. Pure joy! It even made me start this blog - something I’ve been thinking about for months but never got started with.

In one of my next posts I’ll write about my GTD toolset and how I work with it every day.

Take care,
Alex

David Allens website
The book on amazon
The audiobook
about GTD on wikipedia

PS: feel free to leave a comment, if you liked this post. If not, please leave a comment, too and let me know where I can improve. I appreciate it!