Page 41 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

32 Writing Winning Business Proposals

any good parent, you decide to do an insight study for her. Your desired result
is a determination of the best graduate school. This desired result reflects your
“study’s” objective: to determine the best graduate school for her to attend. Before
you can achieve that objective and that desired result, before you can make that
determination, you may desire other information along the way: the cost of
tuition and fees; the percentage of graduates who obtain jobs in her academic
area; ethnic and religious characteristics of the student body; the kind, availabil-
ity, safety, and cost of housing; the school’s proximity to cultural activities; the
cost and convenience of traveling home; and the like. These are deliverables, the
outcomes of your study that you will produce along the way to achieving your
desired result.
Of course, some of these deliverables might be important to your daughter and
not to someone else who, for example, might not care about cultural activities or
ethnic affiliations. And some of these deliverables might be more important to
you (or your daughter) than others. Nevertheless, for your and your daughter’s
situations, the deliverables must constitute that set of outcomes, no more and no
less, that will achieve S2. In other words, the deliverables must be aligned with the
desired result.
The project you did for your daughter was an insight study, and, as a result, the
deliverables you identified were insight deliverables. It should come as no sur-
prise that there are also planning and implementation deliverables:

◉ Insight deliverables are, generally, something tangible, something you can
hold in your hand, such as:
• learning objectives for a training program
• the results of a competitive assessment
• forecasts
• specifications
• validated assumptions
◉ Planning deliverables include the wide range of outcomes necessary for pro-
ducing a conceptual or implementable plan, such as:
• arrangements made to conduct a training program
• resource requirements
• implementation timetables
◉ Implementation deliverables are something you can readily witness or observe,
often capable of being measured and evaluated, such as:
• a program for training consultants
• trained consultants (or sales forces, etc.)
• improved targeting efforts on the part of a sales force