An example is worth a thousand words and helps to avoid a plethora of meetings. It is not uncommon for corporate management to assign the task of writing individual tasks in the Technical Approach to a number of staff members. The Proposal Manager's challenge then becomes maintaining quality control. By providing staff with samples of what is expected from them, the Proposal Manager will simplify his or her task.

First and foremost, your staff should prepare a Work Breakdown Structure from the Request for Proposal (RFP) and use it to develop a Technical Approach Outline. The Outline should contain as much detail as possible. You can use a traditional outline in Word.

Technical Approach tasks are usually consistent with respect to organizational structure, the level of detail needed, tone and style.  Using a Word outline, the Proposal Manager should work with the best technical writer on the team to develop a complete and edited model task. The model task should then be distributed to all technical writers with instructions that the model is what you looking for from them.

The quality of the content from the technical writers will improve dramatically if you can produce a high-quality sample for them to use as a guideline. A typical response will be "Now that I know what you are looking for from me, I will have no problem producing it." Of course, you will not always have that experienced technical writer available to write the model task but any guidelines in model form will improve quality from those who are available. For example, the Proposal Manager may be able to extract a model task from an old proposal and refine and edit it for the purposes of the current proposal. Providing guidance to inexperienced writers is better than no guidance. The better the outline and the accompanying guidance you can provide, the better the proposal.