Thursday, June 03, 2004
Lessons Learned the Hard Way
(Part 4 in a continuing series - Part 1, 2, and 3 are also avaliable for your common amusement)
- Grants should not be written en masse at the last minute.
- Should circumstances require last minute grant writing, it should not be done as a team
- If teamwork is necessary (to complete the mass grant proposals by the deadline) DO NOT trust team members to do anything and do not allow team members to trust you.
- Do not use mail merge mass grant proposals.
Failure to follow this advice means that important pieces will be missing, data will not line up with itself - - and no one will know why or where.
* * *
When a "kind and sympathetic soul" calls from the granting organization to tell you that a page is missing from your application. DO NOT panic. Do not assume that all of your mass grants proposals have missing pieces. Do not spend an entire morning calling all of your contacts to appologize, and begging for permission to fax the page that "kind and sympathetic soul" claimed was missing. (Because the "kind soul" may have gotten mixed up on what page was actually missing). This means you'll fax the wrong form to all the contacts, and still be missing the piece that was missing in the first place.
By the time you discover the mistake of "kind and sympathetic soul" (and have only begun to weed out the mistakes in your own processes) it will be long past the deadline and you will have wasted way too much time on a project that was not supposed to be this difficult.
AAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!
(Part 4 in a continuing series - Part 1, 2, and 3 are also avaliable for your common amusement)
- Grants should not be written en masse at the last minute.
- Should circumstances require last minute grant writing, it should not be done as a team
- If teamwork is necessary (to complete the mass grant proposals by the deadline) DO NOT trust team members to do anything and do not allow team members to trust you.
- Do not use mail merge mass grant proposals.
Failure to follow this advice means that important pieces will be missing, data will not line up with itself - - and no one will know why or where.
When a "kind and sympathetic soul" calls from the granting organization to tell you that a page is missing from your application. DO NOT panic. Do not assume that all of your mass grants proposals have missing pieces. Do not spend an entire morning calling all of your contacts to appologize, and begging for permission to fax the page that "kind and sympathetic soul" claimed was missing. (Because the "kind soul" may have gotten mixed up on what page was actually missing). This means you'll fax the wrong form to all the contacts, and still be missing the piece that was missing in the first place.
By the time you discover the mistake of "kind and sympathetic soul" (and have only begun to weed out the mistakes in your own processes) it will be long past the deadline and you will have wasted way too much time on a project that was not supposed to be this difficult.
AAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!