Page 51 - نموذج

448 16 Writing Proposals

ethics note
Writing Honest Proposals
When an organization approves a proposal, it needs to trust that the people who will carry
out the project will do it professionally. Over the centuries, however, dishonest proposal
writers have perfected a number of ways to trick prospective customers into thinking the
project will go smoothly:
. saying that certain qualified people will participate in the project, even though
they will not
. saying that the project will be finished by a certain date, even though it will not
. saying that the deliverable will have certain characteristics, even though it will not
. saying that the project will be completed under budget, even though it will not
Copying from another company’s proposal is another common dishonest tactic. Pro-
posals are protected by copyright law. An employee may not copy from a proposal he or
she wrote while working for a different company.
There are three reasons to be honest in writing a proposal:
. to avoid serious legal trouble stemming from breach-of-contract suits
. to avoid acquiring a bad reputation, thus ruining your business
. to do the right thing

Writing a ProPosal

on techcomm Web Although writing a proposal requires the same writing process that you use for
For proposal-writing advice, see most other kinds of technical documents, a proposal can be so large that two
Joseph Levine’s “Guide for Writ- aspects of the writing process — resource planning and collaboration — are even
ing a Funding Proposal.” Click
on Links Library for Ch. 16 on more important than they are in smaller documents.
<bedfordstmartins.com/ As discussed in Chapter 5, planning a project requires a lot of work. You
techcomm>. need to see whether your organization can devote resources to writing the
proposal and then to carrying out the project if the proposal is approved.
Sometimes an organization writes a proposal, wins the contract, and then
loses money because it lacks the resources to do the project and must sub-
contract major portions of it. The resources you need fall into three basic
categories:
• Personnel. Will you have the technical personnel, managers, and support
people you will need?
• Facilities. Will you have the facilities, or can you lease them? Can you
profitably subcontract tasks to companies that have the right facilities?
• Equipment. Do you have the right equipment? If not, can you buy it or
lease it or subcontract the work? Some contracts provide for the pur-
chase of equipment, but others don’t.

16_MAR_67948_Ch16_439-465.indd 448 11/29/11 3:35 PM