Presenting the plan

Your proposal must directly support your organization’s overarching purposes, and must include:

1. A clear, simple, compelling definition of the need/opportunity.
2. A clear, simple, compelling statement of your solution or response.
3. A plan and rationale for strategic change.
4. An assessment of significant risks and ways to mitigate them.
5. A structural statement to the effect that it will function as a separate business unit, of which you will be the manager.
6. An operational plan for your project that shows that it is within your means to implement it:
• It must demonstrate feasibility.
• It must include a detailed financial plan with firm estimates of costs.
• It must include other operational information (timeline, milsestones, critical path, cost schedule, etc.) We recommend you include a Gantt chart.
7. A strategy to inculcate innovation into your organizational culture.
8. A convincing business case with a clear dollar value. This may be:
• savings and/or increased income over current revenues.
• risk mitigation with a dollar value of the risk and its probability of occurring.
9. Business ratios you will monitor during implementation.
10. A plan for coaching your staff through the changes as part of your change management.
11. You’ll need a bibliography for details of any books, journal articles, formal interviews, website materials, and unpublished materials.

 

Make your proposal convincing

You need to make the proposal convincing so that your senior management can give their approval. Consider the following tips:

1. Present a convincing cost-benefit business case. Your senior management will not only need to need to approve your project, but also to approve any expenditure. Quite frankly, if you have firm figures showing that your system will show a strong dollar return and will have no negative side-effects, the decision-makers would usually be foolish to reject it.
2. Present information in a way that is easy to understand for non-specialists.
3. Consult your senior management for comment early in the process. However, do not waste their time or get them to plan the project for you. In your proposal, you can show that you have consulted all key stakeholders and gained their approval and support.
4. What are the main points? The main points for your listeners might not be the same points for you. Check with someone during consultation.
5. Show that your approach is sound. Back up what you say with enough concrete, well-researched information:
• If some totals are estimates, be conservative and explain why they are the best available figures.
• If you have identifed significant theoretical concerns, include a more detailed written section on it. A critical review or an annotated bibliography may be appropriate, but it might belong in an appendix.
6. Consider your organization’s bigger picture. Good proposals can be rejected because they don’t consider bigger picture issues that are relevant to the senior managers' decision. For example, link your proposal to your organization’s operating context and strategic direction.
7. Aim for the right length. Your proposal needs to be complete enough for people to accept and brief enough for them to bother reading. If it gets too long, focus their reading on what is really important:
• Put an "Executive summary" at the front. This will be all that some readers need.
• Keep to the point in the body of the text.
• Put in clear section headings. They will make it easy for readers to scan the whole document quickly.
• Include helpful diagrams. They can be clearer and more succinct than text.
• Move other information to the appendices. (An appendix is the place for anything unexciting that you need to include but would distract your readers if put into the text, for example, boring lists, raw data, and supporting documents.) Appendices are placed before the bibliography, because they might include references to sources that need to be included in the bibliography. Appendices are optional because you might not need them.

Later on, when senior management decide on the project, they might give you some helpful feedback, make changes, or impose conditions. You can use any comments or insights from the presentation feedback to improve your draft and produce the final version.

 

Part two: Project presentation

Give a half-hour presentation to gain approval for your plan. Your listeners will be borad members and perhaps senior management. If you are doing it as an academic project, it will also include your lecturers.

• Engage your listeners and speak persuasively.
• Cover the main points clearly.
• Use handouts of no more than two pages and suitable visual aids (e.g. good PowerPoint presentations).
• Do not use gimmicks.
• Close with a clear challenge to accept your project.
• After your presentation, answer any questions.