Twisting the truth for the unknown
Singapore 15th September 2011
Twisting the truth a bit, a few white lies, aren’t we all guilty of it sometimes? We do it to make us look better, feel better, enthuse our potential clients, get a little edge, many reasons. Specifically when we want to reach into an area we do not really have experience or exposure in, yet we know that we can handle it. New start up companies always have this issue that they have no past track record to boast of, so what to do? Saying you have no experience, no track record and that you have no idea whether you could handle a project does not really sound like a great offering to a client certainly if you ask to be paid for it as well.
So we craft our stories carefully to create that little attraction that may pull the potential client over the edge in selecting you for a project. This is unrelated to the fees itself which obviously have to be attractive as well and within the clients budget provisions. Sometimes requests for fee proposals are actually split into a qualitative part and a commercial part. The first lays out your capabilities and ability to perform the job to the requested levels of implementation and deliveries based on merits and track
records, the second part is a simple commercial proposal of the cost of your services and deliveries. By seperating the two and assessing them seperately the two are not influencing each other. We have submitted proposals in the past this way where our commercial bid (fees) may have been ranked the lowest, but our technical merits was ranked, say third. The ultimate award of the project then based on a combined weighted adjudication. This not necessarily awards the project to the lowest or most technically/ creatively competent bidder.
So while the commercial bid is a straight forward arithmic proposition, the technical bid leaves room for some creative interpretation. Of course everything has to be veryviable but then not all references are checked. People read and make their own assumptions. Only when they dig deeper they may find out to what extend you were really involved. I have found suppliers claiming to have been involved in a mega project (like every Tom Dick and Harry in Singapore seem to have been involved in the integrated casino resorts here) only to find out they only suplied some downlights in one of the corridors so to speak. They did not lie…
In Light Watch today something completely different…I mentioned the LED integrated glasses some blogs ago, now there are LED eye contact lenses! The University of Washington figured out a way to implant LED lights in contact lenses would you believe. The purpose being to allow the display of data in sharp images and video directly on your eyeballs! True or false?…
Info courtesy of Elemental-led.com and Trendhunter.com
Light Watch 163: LED contacts
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