Shift Left: Building Compliance and Clarity into Your First Draft

Everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Allison Ritz. I am here again for another office hour session. I apologize. I’m not gonna be on camera today. I have some charts and some things that I wanna share, and I make sure the screen gets all the space. I’m also gonna do some screen sharing, so just backing off the camera to give myself a little bit more bandwidth here. But, again, thank you so much. Thank you for joining us. It’s lovely to see some folks back, and, welcome to our new folks. So last session, we followed one section through a red team, so from a kind of vague invite to a closed resolution log. So today, what I wanna do is go back to that same section. So if you weren’t here the last time, that’s perfectly fine. We’re really just gonna work a requirement through work through, creating content to a section. And, of course, if you’re interested in our previous session, which was really focusing on values from gate reviews, then that’s available to download as well. But just wanna kinda give you some context for where we’re starting. We are going to work through a session, so I’m just gonna reference back. But like I said, it’s… I’ll give you the reference right up front. So if you weren’t here last time, that, won’t matter at all. You can follow right along. So today, what we wanna talk about is kind of the same thing, but we want to think about of everything Red Team found in their review. So how much could the writer have caught while writing it? So today, we want to move some of that checking earlier into the draft itself so review time goes to the questions only a reviewer can answer. So here’s the idea to kind of hold on to for today’s session. So the cheapest review comment is the one that nobody has to write. So we’ll talk through that theme today. You’ll leave with a one page self check. It’s part of the deck, so you’ll get that after as well. And, you know, everything that I’ll talk about today can work in any process. So, this is really going to be a very system agnostic, whether you are doing this manually, whether you have a platform in place, because we’ll talk a little bit about readability, a little bit about quality control, and that will differ based on your system. So I’m gonna keep it pretty general because if you’re using a system, if you’re using Visible Thread, if you are using Word, if you are using any of the tools that are out there, we still need to think about what does this look like from a manual process so that we can work that into our automated process in a meaningful way. At the end, I will go into a screen share if you’ve been in some of these other sessions. Sometimes we’ll do some product videos. Sometimes we will do a little bit of what’s coming in Visible Thread. But some of the things that I’m gonna talk today are addressed directly in the Visible Thread platform with some of the newer features that we have. So I’m just gonna take five minutes at the end, if you have time, if you wanna stick around to walk through, the outline creation and content creation process in the platform and how some of this governance is built in. So all that being said, thank you for joining us, and let’s get started. First thing, just quick housekeeping for anybody that is new… That’s new here. Excuse me. This is office hours, so every other Thursday, thirty to forty five minutes. We have live questions at the end. Follow-up if you… We don’t answer the question on time. As always, connect with me on LinkedIn. I love to continue these conversations. Just a little bit about the series. Like I said, last time we talked about review gates. The replay and the planning template are live on our office hours page if you didn’t catch that, if you’re interested. Today, we are talking about building compliance and clarity into the first draft. And in our next session, we are joined by Kyle Peterson, talking about some of the experiences that he’s had in the field lately. So he has been doing on sites and some consulting, excuse me, with some of our customers. And there are some interesting things that we’re seeing in a trending perspective, what they’re really solving for, how they’re adopting technology, how they’re adapting workflows, as they bring in new, new platforms and new processes and as things change within the market. So looking forward to that conversation with him in a couple weeks. You can subscribe, if you’re not already, to our series, get an update about what, you know, what I’m gonna be on about every couple weeks, and then, you’ll get access to recordings and resources and all of those things as well. So just a little bit of housekeeping there before we jump in. Okay. Chapter Prioritizing Reviewer Judgment So kind of my argument or my thesis for today is reviewers should spend their time on judgment. So would an evaluator score this outstanding? Is the solution credible? Does this section contradict the staffing plan? Those would be the type of questions that only a reviewer can answer. So too much red team time right now a lot of the time gets consumed by problems the writer may have been able to catch earlier. Now this is not, you know, oh, well, we’re blaming it on the writer, and they didn’t catch it sooner. It’s just what can we do, and how can we facilitate writers to catch things sooner, and how can we change some of that behavior in the front end to identify items earlier and reduce the level of downstream impact. So the writer is going to obviously draft to a to a deadline. So we’re all drafting to a deadline, and we’re not checking anything until the gate because the gate is obviously when the checking happens. So the reviewers end up spending time on a missed requirement, an undefined acronym, a number that might have changed between sections, and judgment kind of gets the time that’s left over. So we’re spending too much time in correction and compliance where we can do some of that upfront. So to be clear, I’m not suggesting we’re getting rid of any reviewers or that anybody isn’t kind of holding their end. We just want to make sure that we are spending our red team time on preventable… We’re not, excuse me, spending our red team time on preventable defects, and we’re really focusing on that judgment piece of the puzzle. Chapter Shift Left Proposal Strategy So today, what we’re gonna cover is we’re gonna look at kind of five parts here, the last one being my little jump into our word add in and the Visible Threat platform. But really, we wanna think about why quality problems get caught too late, what shift left means for proposal writing, because that’s, you know, usually a tech to software term. What does it mean in this instance? How writers can check their own work as they go, which is the biggest part of today, and what leaders are going to gain from that process. So two caveats. I’m using pink, red, and gold as kind of shorthand for our, our our stages or our gates. So your organization may use different gates. You may combine them. You might have… Not at all. You might call them something different. But the principle kind of works the same way, but I’m just using that kind of standard as a placeholder. And some of you have very different situations. So some of you are part of a larger proposal center. Some of you are one person who writes, manages, and does BD and wears all the hats. So every check that we’re doing today, like I said, is agnostic. It’s not visible thread dependent. It can work with a manual approach all the way down to using Word in the checklist. So what we’re really wanting to a focus on is timing and is a default. We want to compress that into your schedule, make sure it fits you, fits your team, but ultimately, the, the main message remains. So let’s talk about getting into part one. So we’re going to work through the same section as last time. Like I said, it’s, a 2.3 quality control plan, volume two. I’ll show you what the requirement is, and we’ll work through that. So what we’re thinking about is why some of these quality problems get caught too late. So we’ll look at what red team found, so assuming we’re at the end, what red team found in the review, and this time, when we look at each of those problems and what was written, we want to see how long it took to find and if we could have caught it earlier. So looking at our first section. So we’re gonna work off of a normal twenty one day schedule here just for this example. So the hollow dot would be when a problem was written, so when a problem was written into our draft, and the solid dot is when somebody found it, so when we actually uncovered it and what is the organizational impact there. So the compliance gap. So the escalation path, ultimately, which is what we’re looking for in this requirement, our escalation path was never written. So it was asked for. Was never written on day three. Red team finds it on day 12. Readability. An 81 word sentence was written on day four. It survives pink and red because they’re looking at other things, and then we find that in a gold editorial pass. Some messaging drift. So the executive summary changes 97% on day eight, while two dot three says 98. So found a goal if you’re lucky, but, by the evaluator if you’re not. So that’s something that that could miss a pass. So the distance between those dots is really the problem. So every day in between, more text gets built on the mistake, and there’s one less day to fix it. So we start kind of compounding our issue. So, ultimately, what does that delay cost? So let’s put… Let’s just talk about one finding. So requirement nine from last session requires an escalation path for unresolved deficiency. So we’re just gonna work off of this run one requirement. So neither section two dot three nor two dot four has addressed it at this point. So while drafting. So if we catch this while drafting, it’s one person. One person’s impacted by this. The writer has the requirement open. Write the paragraph, maybe twenty minutes. Nobody else ever knows there was gap, and we catch that right away. Caught at red team, you know, can be four people in this example. The reviewer writes it up. The proposal manager triages it. The volume lead owns it because it spans two different sections, two dot three, two dot four, and the writer drafts it, and then it has to be verified. Plus we need a matrix update. We have had a couple days elapsed, and that really is a better case scenario than catching it at gold. Then it’s everybody above whoever and whoever has to give up, you know, page space because our volume at that point in time is gonna be at the limit. So something else can get cut, something else can get pulled, and that cut might not get reviewed. The issue that we have downstream is that when we start to cut and when we start to resolve, sometimes resolving those issues can create secondary issues. So the closer to the source that we can resolve this, the less organizational impact that we’re going to see. So let’s talk about our worked example. So this was our log, our red team log. It’s from the last example with just the basic. So these are our findings from red team. And what we want to see, we’ve added an additional column here, and we wanna know, could the writer have caught this while drafting? So requirement seven, inspection without correction. Yes. So if we would have read three dot two… M dot three dot two against the paragraph, we would have found that. Requirement eight, the proof point is buried in sentence four. Yes. If we have the message written down and we have our, our positioning information in the front end, that could have been something that we found. Requirement nine, our missing escalation path. Yes. If we’re tracing our l dot five dot three elements, then that blank line becomes more obvious. Requirement 10, QCP undefined on first use. Yes. That is, you know, a front end acronym check. Requirement 11, replacing the flowchart with a photo, no, that’s a judgment about what persuades the evaluator, and that belongs at Red Team. R12, reads long. Partly, readability check can turn reads long into a number a writer can work towards, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later, about how we can use readability in some different standards to work to work some of this into the content creation. So here’s kind of the question. If the red team is finding… Or for a red team review, rather, is finding missing requirements, undefined acronyms, inconsistent numbers, buried proof points, on and on. Are we really reviewing strategy that… At that point, or are we still doing q and a on the process? That’s what I hear most often is that we’re coming to Red Team, and we are still working through misses. We’re still working through inconsistencies. We’re not quite yet to reviewing strategy and reviewing the spots that we should be in that place, so everything is lagging. Chapter Moving Checks Into Drafting Okay. So let’s talk about what shift left means in this instance. So if everything is lagging or coming downstream in a way that it shouldn’t, we need to shift left. So, generally, the shift left terms comes from software world where we’re moving testing earlier in the build. So for us in this instance, it means moving the checking to the moment the text is written. So reviewers keep doing what they’re doing, but they get a better draft to do it on, and we’re moving things downstream downstream in a more meaningful way. So when we’re talking about that and we’re talking about the adjustment, so what moves into drafting and what stays? What do we need to focus on? So we’re looking at a change when things get checked. It doesn’t remove that review, and it doesn’t make the writer the reviewer. I wanted to be clear on that. I’m not saying that all of this now has to fall on the writer. We’re just looking at specific items that we can do to clean up a little bit before we move on. So on the left, what moves into drafting? So every assigned requirement has a paragraph that answers it. The response uses the evaluator’s words from L and M, so we’re using a mirroring customer language. Sentence length, passive voice, and grade level sit inside the team target. I’ll talk about how we can address that in the Visible Thread platform, obviously, but that’s something, depending on the platform you’re using, you know, how you want to address how you’re managing readability, grade level, quality, those types of things. We’re looking at acronyms being defined. The win theme, proof points, and numbers match what capture agreed upon, and we’ll talk about the kind of brief cards and the writing cards before that and how everybody can collaborate there. And the terms match the customer and the rest of the volume, so making sure that we’re one voicing and making sure that we are using customer language. So on the right, what stays at review? So would an evaluator score this outstanding? Is the solution credible? Are our proof points strong? Does… Do we have any conflicts? Are we conflicting with another volume or staffing plan or pricing? And, you know, is this the right strategy for the customer? So we’re really focusing on quality strategy and approach rather than, some of our compliance and, written quality elements. So the rule of thumb is the easiest way to… If we’re thinking… Okay. So if we’re thinking… Excuse me. If we can answer in a checklist… So, ultimately, if a checklist can answer it, the writer needs to check it. If it takes someone who knows the customer or the competition or if we’re thinking about approach or solutioning, that does need to wait for review. So that’s a good, easy way to separate the two. Chapter The Three Essential Checks So let’s talk about three checks with one question we can ask. So everything on the left side of the last slide collapses into these three spaces, and you can have a single question on each from a compliance perspective. Did I answer every requirement assigned to the section in the evaluator’s words? So am I writing for the evaluator, am I writing for the customer? So that’ll catch, you know, miss shall statements, half answers, requirements answered in the wrong sections. Those types of things will all be kind of pulled in if I ask that question. So does it pass that kind of sniff test? Clarity. So can a first time evaluator follow this at scoring speed? So we’re keeping in mind that evaluators are reading dozens of these. So that will catch, you know, a long sentence, passive voice, messy acronyms, proof points buried in spaces they’re not, you know, reads long, long leads, those types of things. And then consistency. So does the section carry the same theme, terms, numbers as the rest of the proposal? So that would catch our 97 versus 98 example that we had in our executive summary and the three different names for one plan. We see that a lot, that depending on the different contributors, depending on who’s involved, we may be calling things different acronyms or different names within our own organization, so we need to have all hands on deck when we’re thinking about consistency. So if we’re looking at all of these items and thinking about kind of the principle underneath… So before we kinda get practical on the how, we wanna talk about what ties those three checks together. So shift left, when we’re talking about it in this capacity, is really about shrinking the distance between an input and the moment the input gets validated, so we don’t wanna separate the source of truth from the drafting decision. The requirement gets checked while you’re answering it. The proof point gets checked when you use it. The customer’s term gets checked when you draft it, and clarity gets checked before the handoff. So the farther the writing gets from the source, the more likely that drift becomes. And most of the time, all of those red team findings that we had, those little misses, those little inconsistencies, was a place where the writer was working from memory instead of the source. So keeping that source material current and continuing to keep that link strong is really important. So this is why the starter section, which is what we’ll talk about now, so our kind of source to get this information for the writer, works really well. And that’s the first thing we’re gonna talk about in this next part. So this is the practical part. So ten minutes of setup before the first sentence, a few minutes at the end of each writing session, and a full pass before the handoff. So we’ll talk about it on that section two dot three that I used for my example. Chapter Implementing Section Starters So here, everything is gonna start with this kind of section starter, what I’m calling the section starter. So it sits at the top of the section in a working document and takes about ten minutes to put together. So, ultimately, on the left here, we’re looking at an example starter. So the two dot three with the starter, three blocks. So requirements. Requirements pasted word for word. So we have the l dot five dot three elements, m dot three dot two, and anything from the PWS assigned to this section. Pasted it here because we… Paraphrasing is kind of where the evaluator’s words get lost. It is important for our writers or it is very helpful for our writers to see the structure and how the requirement is stated and exactly what the evaluator’s looking for. So if you have a compliance matrix or if you have a requirement shred, you can copy from that. If you aren’t working from structured document, obviously, straight from the RFP, same result here. We just wanna have the information there. Then our message card. So this is the theme, the proof point with its number and source, and the customer’s terms. So if capture or BD wrote these down, copy them. So if you have a… An opportunity brief coming over, positioning documents, make sure that you can copy those. If nobody did, I would say a best case scenario or a best kind of approach would be to write your best version and send it to whoever owns Win Strategy. So that one kind of exchange alone can surface a lot of drift just to make sure that we’re on the same page from a positioning perspective. And then our clarity target. So one set of numbers for the whole team so everybody checks against the same line. So we can kind of treat that as guardrails. Like I said, we’ll talk about clarity more on that in a minute, but there, we’re really looking at sentence length, accessibility, grade level, readability, those kind of things to make sure, number one, everybody’s on the same page and the response reads as one, and that everything is accessible for the evaluator, particularly when they are doing a lot of assessment at one time. So I want you to think about this before we kind of move on to the next slide. Let’s think about what this really does. So this simply puts the requirement, the message, and the proof in the same place where the writer is making drafting decisions. So this is kinda the principle of the last slide made physical. And our clarity kind of piece, and our… In in that piece of it… So, we wanna look at the clarity that matters more than we think, and then, of course, step four, delete it before he’s submit it. Give it a color, style, highlight it, make sure it’s… You know, there’s big red arrows. We wanna delete it before we submit it, but it helps to have that guidance in the front end. Okay. Chapter Compliance and Verification Workflow So next, let’s talk about our compliance check, and we want to think about locating requirements and verifying it. So the compliance check really has two steps, and the second one is the one that matters, so we want to locate and then verify. So this is that section two dot three on, you know, day two of drafting. So I’ll go through a couple of these, and then, we’ll talk about kind of how to run this. So our first example, we have l… Okay. L dot five dot three. Excuse me. So our inspection approach is paragraph one. So we’ve addressed l dot five dot three b. We’ve documented and corrected. So if we search for corrective, you get hit in paragraph two, and that’s where people stop, and that can be a little bit of a trap. So if we read the paragraph against the full requirement, it documents deficiencies but never says how they get corrected, so that’s a partial. And another example, the escalation path, so our L. Five. Three c, which was our escalation path. That wasn’t found anywhere, so that’s missing. L. Five. Three d reporting is in paragraph three. M. Three. Two, detect incorrect, partial for the same reason. So ultimately, what we’re looking at here is we want to see what is our requirement, where where was it found, and what is our result? Have we addressed this? Have we partially addressed this? Do we have a miss? So, ultimately, how we can run this is locate. We want to, you know, search. You can search with anchor term depending on what you’re using. If you’re using Visible Thread, that looks a little bit different. If you’re using another platform, that looks a little bit different. But, ultimately, whatever you’re using to find your anchor terms or find your requirements. Then we wanna read the paragraph against the whole requirement. Did we answer every element, or did we just mention it? Have we addressed this appropriately? And then mark our result, address partial missing or answered elsewhere. So ultimately, no matter what you’re using to find the requirements, that is only gonna tell you what to look and what’s there. It can’t tell you whether you complied, so we really have to look at the context of the requirement and look at our response and make sure that we’ve not only complied, but we’ve responded appropriately. Chapter Actionable Clarity Metrics So let’s move on and talk about our clarity check. So I… Like I said previously, we talked about clarity as a marker, and clarity is something that we need to move into the front end to improve our writing. So this is where those kind of reads long or sounds clunky or doesn’t flow sort of things are going to live. We want to give writers numbers instead of adjectives, so we wanna make sure that these are things that are actionable. So on the left is paragraph three of 2.3… Or section 2.3 as drafted. I want to read kind of the first line and just follow along with me. So in order to ensure that the quality of all services provided under the contract is maintained at a level that is consistent with the requirements of the PWS. We are 27 words in there, and nobody has done anything yet. So we have no idea what’s happening. This is like a very… It’s the same idea as a very fluffy executive summary. What we want to do is we really want to focus into that. We want to use our word count. We want to use our space appropriately. We want to make it easier for the reviewer to get to the meat of what we’re trying to say. So on the right, we see the same content rewritten against the team target. So we have active verbs, and every actor has a name. The numbers across the bottom are what the writer actually checks. So our longest sentence went from 81 to 18 words. Our average went from 50 to 14. Our eight passive constructions to none, grade levels down to 11. We have now no undefined acronyms. And so one thing that I wanna say here before we make any decisions, these numbers are just examples. They’re not writing rules. So it is up to your organization to determine what good looks like for you. If you’re doing a lot of technical writing and technical solutions, that may look very different from a grade level and accessibility level than a response or something that isn’t quite so technical. So ultimately, that’s going to matter. And in this situation, you know, a 20 word… 21 word sentence could be fine. Passive voice is sometimes the appropriate choice when, you know, the actor genuinely doesn’t matter to the evaluator. So the numbers tell the writer where to look. The writer still decides. So this is really about these are the items that we can action on, and these give us, metrics to work towards. Chapter Maintaining Volume Consistency So talking about the whole kind of volume and thinking about consistency. So consistency drift comes from sections written in parallel. So every writer is right on their own. They’re just not all right together. Everybody may be writing a little bit differently, a little bit different focused, a little in different style. So the check is simple. We wanna take each line of the message card and search the whole volume for it. So the theme, corrected before they affect operations. So it shows up in paragraph four of two dot three. That is kind of the cousin of requirement eight. If we move it to paragraph one, where the evaluator starts reading, that’s going to be more impactful. Next, our proof point, if we wanna talk about our proof point in this instance. So 2.3 says ninety eight percent first time fix. The executive summary says 97. One of them is wrong. The evaluator will notice before you do. So we want to confirm with the source and use one number. Our name for the plan. We see this a lot. We have quality control plan twice. We have QC program three times. We have QA plan once. Three names for one thing reads like three different things, so we need to tighten that up and make sure we’re using the name, not just our name, the name from the PWS. And then the customer’s word, the customer’s language. The customer says work order. The draft says service ticket multiple times. Use their language. Now if you’re a small team, the message card can be, you know, four lines in an email. If you’re a larger team, that can live within a larger capture plan. Either way, everybody is checking against the same messaging. Just we are making sure that we are following our theme proof point, terms and our customers’ terms. Chapter Integrating Checks into Writing Rhythms So let’s talk about how we can build this into the process. So what does that look like, and how can it be a part of the writing day? So this is a rhythm. Times are default. That can be relative to your team, relative to what’s on the plate, but just a general idea of where to spend more and less time. So before drafting ten minutes, let’s build our starter. Build our starter section, get our message card requirements, and our clarity targets at the top of the section so we know exactly what our… What we’re working towards. At the end of each session, five minutes, we’re just going to trace the paragraphs that you wrote today, define new acronyms. That’s it. Super small. It’s not going to muck up any process or create a bottleneck for you. Before handoff, twenty minutes. That could be less. It just depends on how much you’ve written and what’s there. We wanna do a full pass, so we wanna trace… Use the trace table, the readability numbers, have those inside Target, and have line… All the lines in the message card have been searched. So do we have any gaps? Do we have any compliance issues? Do we have any, you know, clarity or quality issues? And then, you know, after the review, five minutes to review changes, you can rerun a trace on the paragraphs because kind of fixing one finding is a great way to untrace a different requirement. That’s something to always think about. So we can fix one thing and create another problem unknowingly, so we just wanna make sure that we’re doing a final assessment there. So ultimately, in this… These time blocks, we’re talking about, you know, forty five minutes per section spread across days. So we think about the organizational impact, and like I said, this can be shorter, to what would happen in our early example when we found a critical issue at Gold and we had to adjust drafts and adjust links everywhere and really kind of dig into a little bit of restructuring. All right, so this is the card that I was talking about in the front end. Like I said, this is part of the deck. You’ll get that in follow-up. And this is kind of the whole method simplified into one page, so nine checks, three blocks compliance, requirements pasted at the top, each response located, and then read against the full requirement, so anything answered elsewhere carries cross reference instead of a copy if you don’t want to duplicate. Clarity here, sentence link, passive voice inside our guardrail or inside our parameters, or the exception is deliberate. There’s a reason that we’re not doing that, which is obviously going to happen as well. Acronyms defined, you know, quality is there. Consistency. Theme in the first paragraph, numbers matching the message card and the source, terms matching the rest of the volume. So making sure that we’re consistent in our language, and we’re consistent in any, sources or numbers or percentages or any information that we’re providing. So you run the card before handoff. If you’re only gonna adopt one block, so if you wanna start somewhere, I would say start with compliance. That’s where those critical errors that you’re gonna get long term come from. Consisting… Consistency and clarity are very important. They are… When you really get into the nitty gritty of scoring and what wins, you’re gonna find a lot of it there, but if we’re starting from scratch, compliance is going to get us a long way because we’re gonna find those criticals early and not have anything slip there. Chapter Scaling Processes for Team Sizes So let’s talk about how this would scale. So like I said in the front end, this isn’t… You know, you don’t need a giant team and multiple people in place to do this. I know a lot of folks are wearing multiple hats, so let’s look at what this would look like kind of side by side. So if you’re a solo writer, maybe you’re a proposal manager, BD lead, you know, you build the starter yourself from the RFP. Build the starter yourself. Keep the message card short. One theme and one proof point is plenty in this situation. So run the checks before your colleague reads it forever, whoever’s reviewing it internally, and the payoff is that their hour, their review goes to strategy instead of any acronyms or cleanup. And a lot of small teams, a lot of small teams that we work with, that one kind of read review might be all that there is. You have not a lot of hands and a ton of things happening, so we want to make sure we’re getting the most out of that time. So that makes the review more important, not less, even though it can be shorter or much less formalized than some of the bigger places. So we just wanna make sure that all the time that you have is being used effectively. So on a small team of two to five, the BD or capture lead can write the message card, once, and then every writer pastes it. So we just need to know, you know, what’s our positioning, what is our specific messaging, you know, what are we writing to in that instance. And then every writer checks their own sections, and the results go into the column of whatever tracker you already use, whatever matrix, whatever you’re using to track your process. So whoever is going to review opens a draft that already passes the checklist, so we know that it passes the checklist once it gets to the reviewer. On a larger team, you… The proposal manager could publish a starter for every section at kickoff. So the ideal situation would be for somebody to own this and create a starter for every section at kickoff so we’re seeing for every section that’s been identified, the requirements that we’re writing to, what our, you know, messaging card looks like, and what our compliance pieces are, compliance pieces as well as, clarity and our spots there. So writers are gonna self check as always. Pm may spot check a section of a day, and the results feed a section board, and self check becomes that red team entry criterion. So building this into a larger process, obviously, there’s going to be more hands and more checks. But ultimately, whether you’re a solo writer or whether you’re part of a large team, the foundation of that becomes the same. And there are challenges on both ends of the spectrum. Where a solo writer is wearing more hats and may not have as many eyes on what they’re doing to catch things, a larger team usually has a multitude of contributors, and that’s where we get into trouble with clarity, with consistency, with one voicing, and with all of those types of things as well. So there are challenges at both ends. We just have to kind of work off of the same space and make sure we are addressing them. So let’s talk here about kind of what we are gaining from a visibility perspective. So this would be for our, you know, leaders and proposal managers and section leads on the call. So what we’re looking at is kind of a double status report here, and we don’t have to have an extra meeting or an extra space for it. So really thinking about the draft kind of health board, and this is the downstream benefit if you want to scale this. It’s not another method you have to implement. So looking at volume two on day six before any review, each writer pays three results in the tracker they already use, requirements trace, clarity against target, and whether the message card is clean. So there, we’re seeing that 21 and 23 are ready. 22 has one number to confirm. 24 hasn’t had to self check, and 2 dot 5 needs a clarity pass. So that’s three short conversations earlier on… Earlier in in the cycle instead of, you know, 40 comments in a draft as you’re getting deeper into the process. So no new checkpoints, no big process. It’s just the earlier read on where the proposal stands using some of the health checks that we have talked about today. Chapter Measuring Success and Progress Okay, so what I want to do is kind of look at three things that we can focus on for the next draft. So ultimately, if this it feels like a lot of things, something that we can do to get started. No tools required. No issues. One, paste the requirements at the top of the sector before you write the first sentence. So word for word, make sure we search each one. Make sure that everything’s there before we hand off. Two, use readability statistics in whatever tool that you’re using and make sure that if you… However you’re checking readability, we want to make sure we’re all writing to the same thing, so average sentence length, passive voice limit, those types of things. We want to all be on the same page. And then three, write our message card, our theme, our proof point, our term, and the customer’s term. So search the draft for each line before we’re doing that handoff, so making sure that we are just following that checklist and checking those things off before we move on. And then kind of three numbers all from our red team log. So if you started keeping one after last session, I guess that’s, ambitious of me. But after our… I talked about the log in the last session. So if we’re talking about a red team log, if we’re talking about, moving forward for… In our checks and our process. So we want to look at all of our red team findings and think about how many would a self check have caught. You know, in our example earlier, it was four of six, but either way, it should fall, because those numbers may be very different depending on what you’re doing. It may be two. It may be three, whatever that looks like. But that number should fall. The variability of that, it can be kind of all over the place. So findings first raised at gold. So is there anything that gold finds that nobody raised earlier? So do we have any criticals? And not even criticals, just things that we should have caught earlier within the process if all of our safeguards were working. So that should trend towards zero. Sections meeting entry criteria. So how many sections arrive at Red Team traced insider clarity guardrails with a clean message card? And the target is all of them. So that’s the part that we can do on our end. And then together, that’s all going to answer one question. So are reviews finding fewer preventable issues and spending more attention on judgment? So ultimately, that’s the final goal, to prove that this worked and to prove that we’re trending in the right direction. Again, the last thing I’ll say on that is that, you know, my theme for the front, the cheapest review comment is the one that nobody had to write that has no operational impact, and if we can do more in the front end or everything that we can to make sure we’re building cleaner drafts and we’re shifting our review left, we can move a long way in that direction. Okay. I have a couple questions about the office hours page and those spaces. So the office hours page is on our website. If you go to the Visible Thread website under events, all sections will be there, but there is a special page under resources on the Visible Thread website that the office hours page is there as well. Chapter Visible Thread Platform Demonstration All right. So what I’m going to do with the last five minutes is I’m going to jump in to the Visible Thread platform, and we are gonna talk about how Visible Thread manages the outline and content creation process and manages some of this assessment from a writing perspective. So let me share here, make sure we can see that. It looks like all good. Okay. All right, perfect. So I’m going to expand out. What we’re looking at here is our dashboard. I’ve kind of jumped right in to our proposal section of the platform. If you have seen the Visible Thread platform before, you know it’s broken down into our proposal and contract sections. A lot of different things you can do there. Homework notifications are up here on our home page. But I am in our proposal section looking at our proposal dashboard. So in our dashboard, I can see everything that’s happening in my session, so I can see total value of everything I have, my proposal assignment, proposal section assignments, and then my section status. So these are proposals in process. For instance, my MDA shield, obviously, that’s not still in process as an example, has nine… Has 11 sections total. Nine of them are complete. Two are in review. So, ultimately, we can see what our status looks like. Very helpful because we have timelines on due dates. We have recent activity, and then we have section assignments. So we can see how many sections are assigned to each person, you know, what we’re waiting on, and balance our workload and workflows and things like that, but we can see the process of our sections being created. So what I wanna talk about is our… Is the outline itself and how we create content from that and manage some of these spaces. So ultimately, I’m gonna jump in. I have one already prepared for you, but I wanna show you where this information is coming from. So if I jump into this opportunity, I have everything here. I have my amounts, my trackers, notifications, all that. Chapter AI Assisted Outline Generation I’m gonna jump into my outline. So this is created with Generative AI. Ultimately, we’re taking our solicitation documents, our reference documents, and all of the information that we have on the opportunity in the platform. We are going to help you create an outlet. So if I select generate outline with AI, I’m gonna select document. It can be multiple documents that make up my solicitation package. It can be singular documents, so there are a multitude of things happening there. So the system then automatically identifies the document, so it identifies the document, the document type. It identified that this was a statement of work. Then it’s going to start detecting, extracting, and typing requirements. As that process continues, it will identify all of the requirements, all of the requirements that inform the outline. So all of the requirements that are going to have some kind of delivery item and be a part of structuring the outline will be extracted and structured. And as will… As it extracts them, it’s going to then pull them down. This is a little bit larger document, so I apologize for that, but I just want to show you how this starts to flow in, and then we will jump over to the one that I already have completed. I apologize. I’m gonna step to another one, and I will just show you this one. This is what that LEMO has completed. I’m going to regenerate it so you can see what that looks like, and this should detect this pretty quickly and start extracting these requirements. So ultimately, any document, I. What we saw there was that you can regenerate an outline. We can rework these sections so nothing is kind of set and stone. You have a lot of control within the platform. So ultimately, what it’s doing here is it’s starting to extract the requirements. And as it extracts the requirements, it will begin to type them. So it… And this will continue to pull more as we’re going through the process. And once it extracts all the the… Extracts all requirements, then it’ll begin to outline and actually build the outline structure. So as this is beginning, you see you have our requirements here, and then we have type. So the system’s going to tell us all these technical compliance management, different items. So it’s gonna pull through all of those requirements, extract everything, and then construct the outline. So just wanna give you the context of where this is coming from and how it’s pulling this information. Now I’ll jump into the opportunity that I’m going to use and my completed outline. So when our outline is complete, once it finishes generating, it will spit this out. Like I said, that takes just a few minutes, and we don’t wanna sit there through all that time. So this is one that I prepared, ultimately kind of working left to right. We have our sections and our levels. So based on our requirements, we’ve built the structure of this outline. Now you have complete control over this. You can edit. You can change positioning, change structure, add sections, delete sections. So you have complete control over, you know, the end product here, and depending on what that looks like. So the requirements is really where we come into the traceability and the visibility into the accuracy of the outline. So, ultimately, I want to know what requirements made this up. This is an excellent piece of the puzzle we talked about previously, knowing what requirements make up a section so we know what we’re writing to. That also goes into making sure that our outline is accurate and comprehensive. So for instance, I’ll click on this one section, our report queries data management. There are six requirements. It is… Type them as technical. There are six requirements that are part of this, so requirements 65 through 70 are what make up this section. If I want to see where this came from and then read the context around it, oh, I, a writer, anybody in the process, I want to read the context around it to make sure that this is is all correct and that I’m approaching this effectively, and it’s… I haven’t missed anything, then I can see that throughout the document. So this is my outline with all of the requirements that have been identified that I can jump to, and I can review the document. I can review my sections. I can review the requirements within the document. So, ultimately, everything here is traceable. There is no… Oops. Sorry. I clicked out of that. Everything here is traceable. There are no blind spots, no black boxes when it comes to using Gemini in this capacity because we are tracing the requirements from the solicitation documents all the way up to the structure of the outline, and you can follow those same breadcrumbs to make sure that everything is accurate and to give yourself more context. Chapter Assigning Writers and Task Management So then if I wanna begin writing, begin the process, what I can do is I can assign writers. So everything can be managed from this part of the platform. So I can assign writers to specific sections. You see here, I’ve assigned one of my colleagues. I’ve been assigned to this section. I can come through, and I can assign anybody in my workspace to a section, and then they will get a notification that they’ve been assigned to a section, and then that will go on our dashboard that we saw, and everything is recorded as far as balance of work, as far as progress, and all those types of things. I can also leave a comment. So I’m gonna work this section. This has been assigned to me, and there’s a comment here for me. And it says, I want you to reference capability summary documents. So those are the documents that I’m gonna be referencing to answer these specific areas. So let’s go ahead and get started on that. And I’m going to just focus in on my, we’ll say, system administration accent. I’m just gonna write to one. I can write to the whole thing. I can write to my whole section. I’m just gonna write to one just to keep it simple. I’m gonna write in Word, so I can write within the platform. I can go straight into Microsoft Word. So I’m gonna go into Microsoft Word. Next, it’s gonna ask me for my template. This way, you can apply your own templates and your own structures of Word so you’re not reformatting, so you’re not working through all of those. You have branded templates. You have colorization, indexing, all that. So work through our templates, and then I’m gonna generate this. I’m gonna open that Word document, and let me stop share here because I want to share the Word document with you. I’m going to share. Okay. So now I am in my Word document, and we see that I have my requirements mapped. I have… Chapter Grounding Content with Data Collections I provide our system administration capability for role based access to your system administration. So I’m gonna highlight this, gonna highlight this, highlight my requirements, and then I’m going to use the system and say, I wanna address this requirement. So I want to address that requirement, and I’m gonna use a collection. So collections of Visible Thread are how we can connect to SharePoint, connect to your folders, pull in the reference information that you need in order to ground your content in your data as well as reference back to where that information’s coming from. So in the note that was left for me by the lead who assigned this, they said I needed a reference capability narrative. So I wanna reference this capability narrative, continue with that collection, and then create. So ultimately, we are addressing the requirement with our selected test and ask me a few questions about what I would like this to be. I’m just gonna say pros. We’ll say technical evaluator, and I’m just gonna do moderate because we don’t wanna be here all day. And now it’s gonna start writing the content. So I have the information pulled directly from my outline. I have my requirements referenced, and I have my… That I’m grounding in my capability narrative. So that is what I was instructed to do, and we’re going to start with our draft. By doing that, we’re getting the information straight from the outline. We’re writing straight to our outline, and then we are grounding this in our content. So we’re going to get a much higher quality first pass, than if we were doing this in a bit more general way. Okay. So our answer is starting, and what I’m using here, this capability statement, this is an anonymized, capability statement. It’s relative to this opportunity just for demo purposes. Chapter Verifying Proof Points and References And as we’re going through, you’re seeing these reference bubbles. So that’s finished. I’ll show you what that looks like. So, ultimately, if I click on one of these spots… Let me expand this out. So if I click on one of those, it’s going to take me to the section in my document that we pulled this information from. So this is the verification of my proof points. So we talked about that in our message card that we wanna make sure that we’re verifying our proof points. So verifying our proof points here, we can look, okay. This is the reference information. Is our… Is that accurately being represented in the content that’s being created, or do I need to make adjustments? Ultimately, let’s say that this all looks good. I can insert it into this section. If I insert it into this section, and then it’s going to tell me automatically, we’ve detected some heading changes because I added a couple headings in this section. It’s gonna detect the heading changes. Do we want to go with this? Do we wanna save an update outline? If I don’t, I can work through this document until I’m ready, but when I’m ready, I can save an update outline, and that will inform my outline that I’ve added additional sections or additional, levels. Now the final kind of piece here I’m going stop share because what I’m doing is closing this out, and then I’m going to jump back to the platform. So now back in the Visible Thread platform, if I’m in my proposal writing section, we see that system admin and access management. Now this is read only in the system because it is being worked on directly in Word. You can do both. You go back in Word and change it. You can work in either place. There are a lot of things that we can do there. But ultimately, I work in Word. It pulls it right back into the platform. Chapter Managing Readability and Style Guides Then I can run my readability and my outline. I can do that in the Word add in as well. So in the Word add in or in the platform, we can manage readability. So that that… This is where we can operationalize long sentences, passive voice, readability, grade level. We have watchwords, so we’re looking at one voicing for our style guides, for customer style guides, and making sure that we’re managing this effectively, and we’re doing guided review so we can work through the quality aspect, and everybody’s working toward the same space. Then finally, in my proposal outline, we see that I have created this content. It is linked, so this is the document that I’ve created. This is when. This is when it was updated, and then I can change the status and say that I’m drafting for these sections, that these are drafting. Ultimately, work through this process on the whole place in the end when everybody’s… Everything is done and we’re ready to go. I can combine this into one document to put my proposal together. But the the important thing here is that in the Visible Thread platform, we have the ability to create the outline, trace requirements, assign work, leave notes, leave instructions, track status, track progress, track updates, and collaborate with our team. Chapter Visible Thread Workflow Summary So I’m going to stop there. It was my kind of little bit of a review over the way that we handle this in the Visible Thread platform. Like I said, whether you’re using Visible Thread or whether you’re doing this manually or using a different platform, the kind of rules that we talked about today and the goals still stand. Everybody will get the report. I did have a couple questions. I know we’re a little bit over, so I will follow-up with some folks on those, But you will get the copy of the deck with the checklist and the recording. That self check card is in the deck, so that’ll be included. And you’ll have a copy and access to the recording as well as access to in that email, there will be a link to register for some of our other sessions if that’s something that you’re interested to. Like I said, in two weeks, we will have Kyle Peterson on deck and be talking about some of the things that he’s seeing in the field and some of the ways that our customers are not only leveraging our platform but leveraging technology and adapting workflows in this kind of new environment, so a lot of really exciting things. So I will go ahead and stop there. Again, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for being here, and we hope to see you in two weeks. Everybody have a wonderful rest of the day and weekend. Thanks so much. Bye.