Use a table-driven approach to develope a detailed technical approach outline. This provides a highly-structured framework for defining tasks, sub-tasks, time-lines, staffing requirements, solution concepts and approaches. Customer feedback on our new product has been tremendous.

In practice, the table-driven approach is applied as follows:

• A Word table is prepared for each task in the technical approach.

• The first column of the task table lists the potential topics to be addressed in each sub-task. Each topic is listed in a separate row. Examples of some of the subjects listed in the rows include purpose, scope, customer benefits and risk considerations.
• The title of each sub-task is then entered as column headings.

We recommend that the company's proposal manager and technical writers convene in a group setting. The group would then work together to fill in the cells of each task table. The resulting content is an outline of the company's technical approach.

Once the technical approach outline is finished, the group meetings or online collaborative sessions should continue in order to further refine and expand the task tables. In effect, the technical approach itself is being structured and written without the technical writers even realizing it.

The proposal manager then deconstructs the task tables into a traditional outline structure and the outline is used to finish writing the technical approach.

The table hierarchy helps technical writers identify the following:

• The interrelationship of task and sub-tasks in the technical approach
• The topics and subtopics that need to be covered
• The appropriate place for topic and subtopics to be covered in the task/sub-task hierarchy
• The level of detail that must be covered

The table-driven approach replaces techniques such as the use of story boards for adding content to a high-level outline. The approach helps to provide technical writers with a structure for creating content (thereby freeing them up to fully utilize their creative and other skills necessary for the development of an effective proposal).