It is midnight.

I have clocked 72.0 work hours in the last 7 days.

Proposal countdown

It is now D-6:45. I have been working since 7 p.m. after a 4.5-hour sleep. Drank a B-complex energy shot a little while ago. Almost everything of mine is done (though some printing remains)... the two guys that have been working on pricing all night are STILL working on pricing, which is about as ridiculous as it gets. As the proposal manager I should be able to send them for reeducation in Siberia for this, but I'm fairly sure my recommendations will fall on deaf ears. Or rather everyone will go, "Rahr rahr, lessons learned, do better next time!" and promptly unlearn any possible lesson.

I have been asking the entire team for a couple weeks who is actually going to deliver this thing to Man Asses by 2 p.m. today. The Division head, Bug Doldrum, emailed me last night three obnoxious things in a row: 1. I'm going to bed now. 2. It's the account manager's responsibility to get the prop delivered (the account manager works out of Splatcom's Richmond office). 3. I'm not going to be in tomorrow. Fourth obnoxious thing was when my boss Oguk discovered that Bug's Gantt chart for the project took installation into bleeding DECEMBER, when the RFP stipulated completion by end of August (it's a school system, after all; they want it all in place before the kiddies come back). So Oguk has spent the last few hours redoing Bug's work from scratch, because of course Bug never puts anything on the network drive.

Rahr rahr, lesson learned: Swat Bug.

Proposal countdown

D-3:05. Printing became an issue when the office filled up and everybody was printing stuff. Like every proposal shop I've ever worked at, there's no dedicated proposal printer, which is 17 different kinds of stupid all kludged together.

I finally had all my stuff printed; the costing guys finally said they were done and could live with their bill of materials and their pricing summary; I'm walking into the conference room where all our binders are set up (also no dedicated proposal production SPACE), and my boss says "There's a problem with the pricing; don't let anything go out yet."

And somehow this is my problem too.

Splatcom's pres, Frank Gymnast, is SO not happy with this prop. He's already called a meeting for a week from today to debrief on everything that went wrong and how to avoid it in future. I'll have a few choice words on the subject.

Meanwhile my mom called this a.m. and left her second messages in 24 hours, sounding pretty dire; but I already knew the news from eloquentwthrage's LJ: my grandmom is hospitalized and maybe gonna die. That's nice news to color the tail end of this horrific proposal process.

Ta-da!

The proposal was out the door by 11:30 a.m.

This was one of the worst proposal processes I've ever presided over. In some sense I realize how much of this was beyond my control—a perpetual complaint in companies where absolutely no license (nor carrot, nor stick) is given to the proposal manager to enforce deadlines and assignments. But it is precisely my job description to GET things under my control. Part of this can be accomplished by schooling more of the techie folks around here in the basics of proposaling; I pitched a sort of "Proposals 101" workshop to my boss months ago and it fell by the wayside. Time to resurrect that one.

Time also to take some VP types to task for not ensuring that sufficient technical resources/SMEs were devoted to this project from the early stages on.

Finally, we desperately need to hone our design review process; it's absolutely astonishing that some very key design concepts (and flaws) came to light only last Thursday, after almost a month of informal and formal design reviews and tweaking.

Ugh. Tired gourd.