Saturday, June 16, 2007

Ranting

What on earth makes us think that customers wish to read pages and pages of our company's history (when we ourselves can't read through it)?

What makes us think that as long as we fill a proposal with gobbledegook and make it 100 pages long (thereby rendering it completely unreadable), it's alright to paste the exact same paragraph and diagram in multiple sections?

What makes us believe that proposal writing demands the unconditional surrender of both, the English language and logic, so that under the header "Project Management Methodology", we are compelled to write, "This section explains ____'s Project Management Methodology"?
And what makes us think that "project management methodology" as a part of a sentence is deserving of proper noun status?

And finally, why does nobody responsible for writing these proposals ever think about these things?

I think that the Indian offshore IT industry is in severe need of good communicators who:
a. Can write in short, clear sentences.
b. Approach communication from the customer's perspective, asking not "What do we want to showcase?" but "What would the customer like to see?"
c. See the function of communication as clarifying a point, not obfuscating it, and weigh content by substance, not by the pound.

Aaaarrrrgggghhhhhh.