Well, it took two days, but we did it—we got a proposal submitted to my former company for fixing their value-robbing, daily tasks.
I mentioned yesterday already, that I was impressed by how quickly the team understood the issue at hand to the point that they were able to draw it. After talking to Keith about the whole experience, I was also impressed at the abundance of uncommon language that we accumulate in our own industrial worlds—let alone the acronyms.
As I was reviewing the project, i was frequently surprised and humbled by the terms or words that I would use that did not translate across to those outside the industry in a way that they could understand. I had to rephrase a lot of my statements to put them into terms that could be understood by those who don’t know the industry language. It’s weird, but kind of cool. I can now see that there is maybe even more value than I’d realized to being multi-lingual no matter the language being referred.
Anywho, i worked with Micah on building the proposal while Nick drew up the diagrams. I worried about the specificity of both the proposal & the production values I was having Nick input into the diagrams. Perhaps, i shouldn’t present a proposal with their exact production numbers, and perhaps it wouldn’t be wise of me to include a true cost justification of their engineers’ annual hours spent on this task, and perhaps I should be a little vague when it comes to the fact that this task has resulted in a high rate of turn over for their engineers, but then again, it’s good to know your customer right? I know they like numbers. I know that my former boss really relied on this task to help us discover potential material losses as early as possible, so why not include its detection ability right there as the number 1 benefit of this application. I feel like it all needs to come across humbly subtly, if that makes sense. Afterall, I wouldn’t want my knowledge of the inside to deter them from contracting with us, as it is probably the most valuable asset I bring for them—along with expert developers who picked up the issue in only one 8 hour session, of course.