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DR. MATTHEW J LIVESEY: Hi. I wanted to run through quickly today the basic structure of the proposal. The reason that we need to have a structure laid out for proposals is that it's a large and complex document, and it's much easier for you to take it in pieces. And so the structure of those pieces is what I'll cover in the next couple of minutes.

So let's move on to project three, which is our major proposal. So today, as I said, I'm going to talk about structure. I'm going to give you now a rundown of everything that needs to be in your document, the major proposal document, and I'll cover each of them individually in a moment. This is the listing of headings that you should have in your proposal document [ON-SCREEN TEXT:

• Executive summary
• Introduction
• Statement of the problem | opportunity
• Objective(s)
• Method or activities
• Resources (human and other)
• Schedule
• Justification
• Budget
• Measurement

], and you should format them as headings so that it's clear, the structure of the document and how it works. And the reason for that is that proposals are often read discontinuously. Someone will take a piece of it, read it in isolation from the others. So you need to have headings that indicate what the sections are, and you also need to write it in a way so that someone who picks up just a piece of it can get what they need from it.

An example of this would be, if you've got a proposal that's making its way through levels of decision-making in a company, chances are the person who manages the accounting, the finance, the CFO of the company or the controller of the company is going to be mostly interested in, for example, what the budget says. And so that person receiving this proposal might flip directly to the budget. And so the document needs to be well-organized so that that person can find exactly what he or she needs, and it also needs to be written consistently so that everything that's in the budget is reflected in the rest of the proposal and everything in the rest the proposal is reflected in the budget. Each section should be clear to you in terms of what it needs to do. And if it's not, please do ask, and I'll clarify.

Executive Summary

So the first thing is the executive summary, and the executive summary should be very brief, one paragraph, less than a page, sort of 50,000-foot view of the entire proposal. It should be an abstract of all the elements of the proposal. And this should be written in a way so that an executive making a decision on a proposal has what he or she needs to make that decision just by reading what's in the executive summary. And there should be no surprises in the rest of the proposal. So the executive summary needs to be a bottom line. How much that something is going to cost, how long it's going to take, what problem it's going to solve, and what your proposal will deliver. So this really needs to be an abstract of the entire proposal that you're making.

Introduction

The next section is the introduction, and the introduction provides an overview of the proposal. Now, the executive summary has given an overview of the entire project. The introduction serves to say here's what I'm going to cover in this particular proposal. It shows your familiarity with the problem, positions you as the person-- or your team as the ones to solve the problem, and it puts the problem in a business or organization context that the person reading it can understand. So this, again, should be a fairly brief section simply to say, here's what you'll find in this document.

Statement of the Problem or Opportunity

The next section in the list is the statement of the problem or opportunity, and this is a really critical key section of the proposal because what you're doing in this section is you are demonstrating that you understand the problem or the magnitude of the opportunity. You're establishing your credibility to deal with that problem or to address the opportunity. And you're also motivating some urgency around addressing the problem or the opportunity. So this section is really about positioning you as an authority on the problem or opportunity and getting buy-in from your reader that this is a problem that needs to be solved or an opportunity that must be pursued.

Objectives

Having established the problem or opportunity, you move to the objectives. The objectives really details your solution to the problem or shows how you'd like to address the opportunity. It answers the question, “What does the solved problem look like?” And you should be as specific as you can in this section. You should provide metrics.

If you're addressing a new market, what the sales are likely to be in that new market. If you're proposing something that will make the company or organization more efficient, then how much more efficient will it be? Talk about percentage of increase in sales or percentage decrease in costs or number of hours saved in a particular process or new customers added. Be as specific and as quantitative as you can in this section because what you establish here as metrics you'll pick up in the last section of the proposal, the measurement section. So you need to have numbers here. You need to show really precisely what your solution will deliver.

Method or Activities

After you've established the objectives, you're going to talk about the method or activities. This is how you go about solving the problem or addressing the opportunity, how you're going to get to the objectives that you've just stated. So what you'll do here is propose exactly what you want to do, what your project looks like. All right.

You should talk about a detailed plan for delivering on the solution that you've outlined so far. You may need to do some research on this. You may need to look at some of the research activities that I've talked about in the previous video about developing the proposal topic. You should address alternative solutions to say that we could solve this in three ways-- A, B, or C. A is the best way to solve it because B and C fall short in these particular areas. Show the person reading it that you've thought carefully about all the alternatives. But in this proposal, you are proposing a single, best path forward that you believe will solve the problem. And this section, the method or activities section, becomes your implementation plan. This is what you will deliver if the proposal is accepted.

Resources (Human and Other)

After that, there are several sections that talk about the nuts and bolts. First is resources and that can be human resources, the people you will need to work on this. But it also can be computer time. It could be capital resources. It can be released time from other duties. It can be hiring new people. It can be a whole range of things. And so anything that you will need in order to fulfill your proposed project, this is what you need to list here, and this is also where you would talk about what the management structure of the project would be. Who is going to take the lead in managing the project as it is implemented?

Schedule

After that, you'll want to run through the schedule. Now, this might be very detailed if you're proposing to build a new hospital. It could be less detailed if you are simply trying to implement a new way to order office supplies. So the scope of this will depend on the scope of the project.

You need to have a realistic timeline. A lot of times, in proposals that I see for this class, things are done very, very quickly and without a lot of process around them. You need to have a realistic timeline for implementing. And the schedule is sort of a thumbnail sketch. You can flip to the schedule. You can see exactly what's going to happen throughout the entire project.

Justification

There's a section here that you need only for certain kinds of proposals. If you are writing a bid proposal, a proposal to develop new work, or a research proposal, you would include a justification section to say, I am qualified or my team is qualified to do this work. If you're doing an implementation proposal, then you don't need a justification because you already work for the company. You want to improve something the company does. There isn't really a need for a justification section. So this section only applies for bids proposals and research proposals.

Budget

Second-to-the-last is the budget, and this is what we might call a “quantitative abstract of the proposal.” Everything you do has a cost, and every cost needs to be reflected in the budget. And that's true whether you're saying, we are going to take people off of this job and put them onto this job. There's a cost to that. Think about, in terms of economics, what the opportunity cost is. Everything that you do comes with the cost of not doing the next best thing you could be doing. So your budget needs to reflect the real cost of all of the things that you've undertaken in the course of the proposal. So there should be nothing in your proposal that isn't reflected as a line item in the budget. And this can be a spreadsheet. It can be a list, however detailed you think you need to be for the proposal that you're making.

Measurement

Finally, the measurement section. Here you'll take the metrics that you established in the objectives section, and you will show how you're going to measure progress. It's very important to show the decision-makers who are going to approve this proposal how you'll know that you've solved the problem. And this can be dollars. It can be hours. It can be whatever other efficiencies. If you want to say that you've increased customer satisfaction, well, how are you going to measure that? You need to survey customers before and after. So everything that you say you're going to deliver, you need to have a way to measure and how you're going to make that measurement happen.

All right. Again, if you've got any questions about any of these sections or how the proposal needs to be structured, please drop me a note immediately, and I will clarify. The proposal is a sort of centerpiece for this entire course, and we need to be clear on how it needs to be written. So please drop me an email at any time. Otherwise, I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Thanks. [ON-SCREEN TEXT: CC 2010 Dr. Matthew J Livesey]

Transcript available upon accommodation request.