Chet’s Blog

BASELINE MEETINGS PROCEDURES AND PRODUCTS
I developed the idea of baselines for winning bid development for my company, Datawrite, Inc. (www.datawrite.com) over twenty years ago. This process was published in “Building a Contract, Solicitations/Bids and Proposals,” by Chester P. Shinaman, National Contract Management Assoc., Vienna, VA, 1990. Now many new business disciplines incorporate these ideas. However, [...]

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DISCOVERING SOUTH BALTIMORE
Nestled below the rolling hills of south Baltimore is BWI, one of the best airports in the U.S. You can even eat at one of the many local fish and crab restaurants there including Legal Seafood. Up the hill are many large businesses and the chain hotels to support them.  Datawrite (www.datawrite.com) has [...]

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STORYBOARD DEVELOPMENT
Introduction
Storyboards are a method of capturing proposal material in shorthand before a first draft is written. They are tools to help capture management evaluate the strategies, approaches and substantiating data for approaches in a clean, easily editable format. Once the draft is written it is much harder to see this armature, or framework of [...]

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Destination: BETHPAGE, NEW YORK (Long Island)
Nestled near the center of Long Island, Bethpage, Plainview and Hicksville are still bedroom communities for New York City. It is a professional and blue collar working community proudly supporting various defense and IT related businesses. Although many of these have down sized due to the unrelenting New York State [...]

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STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
INTRODUCTION – HOW TO MAKE A COMPELLING CASE
Strategy in bidding is much misunderstood. Strategy, simply put, describes a customer centric approach to specific requirements stated in the SOW or Specification that achieves an advantage over the competition and at the same time gives benefits to the customer. The strategy is the basis for [...]

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FRANK and I SORT IT ALL OUT
One day Frank and I were sitting in a huge war room in the middle of nowhere trying to put together a difficult proposal volume. The draft we had received from the team didn’t follow the approved storyboards and there were no graphics included in the text. We had [...]

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How I Got To Know the Area
In 1985 I decided that it was time to move my company, Datawrite, Inc (www.datawrite.com) from my home in Florida to where the action was, Washington, DC. My wife loved politics, she could watch both sides objectively – a capability I never achieved. But I wasn’t going there because [...]

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Virtual Reviews enable teams with remote groups to have a single, cohesive review while saving travel and schedule costs. With a part of the core review team present in the war room, the remote sections of that core team use a tool like NetMeeting and speaker-phones to follow the flow of the review. In this [...]

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Getting There
Melbourne International Airport is small but has nonstops to Atlanta, Baltimore and the Bahamas. Orlando airport is about an hour drive.  Since Datawrite, Inc. headquarters are in Clearwater, Florida, I always drive over.
Working Conditions – Weather, etc
Because of the mid-Florida east coast location, the weather is pretty consistent here year around. You won’t need [...]

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CONSULTANT’S CORNER
On the last day as Frank and I walk out of the war room and say good by to all of our new friends we always feel both elated over the job we accomplished and sad to leave everyone. It is, however, nice to be going home and I must admit that after a [...]

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