Content plan validation prior to implementation
A Proposal Content Plan should not be considered final, and writing should not start, until it has been validated
Validating your Content Plan before you start to write:
- Prevents re-writing and editing cycles.
- Enables you to confirm that the approaches are correct before you start writing.
- Provides you with a reliable baseline to measure the draft text against.
- Validating the Content Plan is more important than validating the draft text.
It is important to confirm that the Content Plan contains everything that it should, and that the instructions it contains are correct before you use it to create the proposal. In other words, you should confirm that if followed, it will produce the desired proposal. The time to catch differences of opinion or defects is while things are in the planning stages and before you have a narrative document to work with.
When implemented properly, the Content Plan becomes something that you can use to measure the draft text against in later reviews. You can compare the draft text to the Content Plan to see whether the Proposal Writers achieved everything they were supposed to.
This will only work if the Content Plan is reliable. That is why validating the Content Plan is actually more important than validating the draft text of the proposal. If the Content Plan is valid, then all you need to do is check the text to make sure it fulfills what’s in the plan.
The alternative is to rush to a first draft and then perform an endless series of rewrites until you stumble across a winning proposal or you run out of time. Usually you run out of time.
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