Chet’s Blog

Branding your company’s proposal requires a look
and feel that reflects your solution.  Using a web based program portal as a
part of your proposal significantly enhances this branding.  Here is a
method of showing continuous progress on the
proposed program activity even after the proposal
has gone in for evaluation.  And it doesn’t count
against page limitations.

The program portal will give a final branding to your
approach.  It will update the progress of your approach
allowing the government to follow the development of the
features that you proposed.

The portal design begins with
a simple drill down diagram. Working with
engineering, logistics and management, you and
your Information Technology group will be able to
access the data most critical to the programs
success.  This information will be split into
different screens.  The box at the top of the
example(Figure 1)represents the Home Screen and
portal into the rest of the web site. Buttons on
the screens represent links to program specific subjects and
data.  These lower level screens allow drill down
to even more specific data like the availability
of critical or long lead parts.

Figure 1.  A Drill Down Chart is the First Step in
Building a Program Portal for Your Proposal.

Once you have developed the drill down chart, you can
work with the Information Technology Group to
design the web pages and to further refine the
links. Adhere to the color palette that you follow
in your proposal.  Use a portion of the cover art
to achieve branding between the proposal and the
portal web pages.

The program portal allows a client to see real time
status of maintenance and parts availability (in
this example).  If an aircraft were unavailable
the client would be able to see exactly where it
is in the maintenance cycle.  The client could
further deduce if the maintenance is on
schedule and therefore, if your management of
the program is working. A portal is only as good
as the data in it.  So once you launch a portal it
will need to be kept up to date by your team.
Like any other recurring task, key personnel must
be accountable for data updates.  The upside is,
that once the portal is working you have continual
client visibility.  It is one great sales device
that just keeps giving.

No Comments »

Trackback URI | Comments RSS