Disorganization...Learn to Love It

So...with my proposal girl cape firmly tied around my neck (oh if only the string would break) and the hand off to me as being "in charge" of this proposal, I nerdily got out my calendar and reverse engineered a schedule that would put us with an ontime submission with no weekend work. I then emailed the schedule, writing assignments, and request for comments or questions to my team and started getting to work.

And then it all fell apart.

First, there was the teaming partner who isn't sure if they want to be a teaming partner. They won't sign the NDA. They won't sign the teaming agreement. And oh, hey, they're not going to work on any proposal pieces til this is worked out. But who can work it out? Only the CEO. Guess who's too busy to actually get involved? That's right...the CEO. The jury's still out on that one, but I'm not hopeful.

Then, there's the COTS provider. Who we really want to be a teaming partner rather than a vendor. Who isn't sure that they want to be a teaming partner and who "would've bid this on their own if they'd known about it." I'm thinking they may still. Without them, we have no proposal. But who can make this decision? That's right...the CEO. See above. Do we have a COTS product? Jury's still out.

And then, speaking of the jury, the proposal lead on the teaming partner who IS all the way committed to doing this...got called for jury duty. So he's not going to be overly available.

Did I mention this thing is due in now under 9 days? And we're still floundering around trying to decide if all the pieces are together such that we actually COULD bid. If any one of those pieces don't come together, we don't qualify. And we'll just be wasting a ton of time writing a proposal that we can't submit.

And thus I am unmotivated to really drive myself to get my pieces done. Because...writing proposals just for the sake of writing them, doesn't float my boat.

To top it all off - the main reason I'm "in charge" of this proposal effort is because the CEO has somehow decided that I'm not techincal, so he's looking for a place to put me. While the underlying idea is kind of nice (i.e. find people a place rather than fire them if you don't think they have something to offer), I just don't get how I suddenly became non-technical. And if it keeps on too much longer, I may just have to go find myself a job that will let me use all those wonderful technical skills I spent time in school developing. Because while yes, I can write proposals, I can also write code. And given a choice, I choose code every time.

Sigh. Let the job ADD begin!