PROJECT Management explored

I am often amazed by the way commercial organisations can put a lot of assurance around the process of delivering their projects but not apply similar standards to managing the proposal process which generated the work.

Especially in larger organisations where these are often different teams of people and in these circumstances it isn't uncommon for the customer to know more about what has been proposed than the project team because comms haven't flowed through from the sales team effectively.

Even if it the same people bidding the work and then delivering it there is often a significant elapsed time between the activities and the bid is invariably conducted with in sufficient time and information and lots of assumptions being made and communicated so having a process framework to guide, store and enable things to be found later is a big help.

I have introduced a formalised proposal process into a corporate and dealt with it as a standard and integral part of the PM process and it was very successful, which is why we ship our PPP (Proposal Preparation Process) method template alongside PRINCE2 and DSDM Atern as part of the default pack with all our commercial products.  In the commercial packages docs can be live linked (shared) between projects so materials from the proposal can become integral parts of the delivery project making the process completely joined up and we also support a Sales Funnel report to allow you to group and total up figures on all the proposals you are working on.

If you are a Community Edition user don't worry you can still get access to PPP and use it on Community Edition....for free.  You just need to download the PPP method template and add it to your method library on CE.  You can get the PPP Method template from here.