Among all types of effective communication tools, a well designed proposal can be one of the best convincing communication to stakeholders or any other person to let them know our ideas about any improvement. It provides a much more in-depth analysis and contains many details on how one person want to propose his/her ideas. As I learned in the class, an effective proposal should have a great amount of research. It is the observation and facts speaks what we want to propose, not based on our bias.
We have spent at least 4 hours together as a group outside of the class to complete our first proposal. We have proposed that undergraduate students at Lundquist College of Business need a way to build relationship with working professionals because it would give them a competitive advantage when searching for a job after graduation. This is true pretty much in any business school and the need can be improved endlessly for ever. According to Ron’s feedback for our first proposal, the need for students was too vague and broad. What we really need to focus on was to find some specific problems that LCB has and maybe problem could be possibly solved within limited amount of time and resources. Another delinquency that our proposal had was the lack of research. At the first proposal, we pretty much based on a couple of samples from students and our own opinions to guess what might our undergraduate students need.
After seriously reviewed Ron’s feedback from the first proposal, we were able to focus more on the research. We conducted over 100 students survey from the business major undergraduate students. Comparing with our prior survey, we only had less than 20 students’ opinion. Also, we have called University of Washington’s business school under career center, and we have found more helpful information that students really need is the sense of urgency to use the school resources. This time, we were able to find a solution, but according to Ron’s feedback, our solution was about to give a mandatory class in LCB that forces students to use school resources. It was a bad idea because forcing students to do something we think is good for them is not going to work. What we really need to deliver is letting the students realize the importance of building relationship with working professionals and be able to develop these necessary skill to achieve that goal.
At the week 8, we have turned in our final proposal. This time, we were able to find a better solution for students need to give them proper amount of sense of urgency to attend our business network dinner. Still our communication through proposal need to be improved in the future. According to Ron’s last feedback we have received, we have learned that in a proposal, it was all about the facts. In our proposal, we have used many expressions such as “We believe,” or “We feel that…” These expression would not be a good communication to the committees because our opinions were not relevant to the proposal.
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