Page 72 - Writing Winning Business Proposals

CHAPTER 5

Using Logic Trees

to Construct Your

Methodology

s was discussed in Chapter 2, the objectives in your proposal express the
1
Asteps your project will take me. These steps can result in my having insight,
a plan, and/or an implemented plan. The objectives are an important set of out-
comes of your project, and your methodology describes how you will achieve them.
It consists of a logically sequenced group of actions that will achieve the objectives.
Unfortunately, many of the methodologies you present in your proposals don’t
persuade me that you will effectively achieve the project’s objectives. Sometimes,
those methodologies contain vague generalities such as “interview management,”
“gather data,” “analyze data,” and “report results.” These generalities provide me with
very little or no insight about how, precisely, you will achieve the objectives. Other
times, the methodologies contain more specific tasks, but the logical relationship
among the tasks and the objectives is unclear, as is the relationship of the tasks to
each other. From my perspective, it often appears that you cut and paste from pre-
vious proposals to describe what you will do in this project. That’s not good enough
to prepare winning proposals, especially if a thoughtful, tailored methodology is
one of my hot buttons or one of the selection committee’s evaluation criteria.

63