Page 196 - MY STORY

interest to leave the “HEL program” and get back into

“functional” management. So that’s what I did.

CHIEF ENGINEER AT LAST

I became Chief Engineer of the Materials and Process
Department and basked in the environment of having a
work area with windows again. It was sort of like

“coming home” but the challenges were more associated
with personnel, budgets, strategic planning, some bid and
proposal work, and program support than “technical

stuff.”

PROPOSAL WRITING
By this time in my career, I had participated and led many
competitive proposal efforts to acquire R&D and system
contracts from the US Government. I had also

established a pretty strong win record and had established
some pretty non-negotiable approaches to proposal

writing. One non-negotiable rule was that every proposal
would contain a detailed Program Plan in the executive
summary at the front of every proposal. The program

plan would start with “what we knew at program
initiation” and end with “what was going to be delivered
to the customer at successful program completion.” The

hard, and demanding, part was showing the customer