Gail & Jim Greenwood, Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

Copyright © 2004 by Greenwood Consulting Group, Inc.

We continued to be baffled by the number of Phase I and II SBIR/STTR proposals that we review that do not include timelines. Therefore, we thought we’d devote this article to this simple but powerful tool.

What is a timeline? Simply put, it is a graphic that helps the reader see when you will be accomplishing certain things during the course of the SBIR/STTR project. It often includes lines showing when the various tasks will be performed, and can also show important events or milestones such as completion of reports or prototypes.

So why should you include a timeline in your SBIR/STTR proposal? One good reason is that the agency may expect you to. For example, NSF mandates that you include a Gantt Chart (a fancy timeline with extra bells and whistles) in your Phase II proposal.

Another good reason is that it demonstrates to the reviewer how you will pull off the proposed workplan in the time frame allotted. Some reviewers will be skeptical that you can do all that you plan to do in your Phase I STTR, for example, so they want to see a timeline that shows exactly when each task will be done. This timeline could help clarify that several tasks will be occurring simultaneously rather than sequentially, thus making it possible to do everything you propose in a nine month period.

A third good reason to include a timeline is that it helps summarize the flow of the project. If you just write something like "Task 1 will be completed 4 weeks after the start of the project, Task 2 will be completed 6 weeks after the start of the project, Task 3 will be completed 7 weeks after the start of the project, …." then the reviewer really cannot get a visual sense of how this project progresses from start to finish. This is especially true in a Phase II project where you get no sense for the progression when the proposer has just finished a page with "Task 27 will be completed 94 weeks after the start of the project."

A final good reason to include a timeline in your SBIR/STTR proposal is that it provides a graphic that breaks up all that text you’ve been laying on the reader page after page after page. People get tired of seeing nothing but words—they enjoy an occasional picture or table (or timeline) that breaks up the text.

So there are plenty of good reasons for including a timeline in your proposal. So why don’t more SBIR/STTR proposers use them? Darn good question. We wonder if proposers think timelines are hard to create. Sure, you can use project management software to do these things, and these are great tools if you know how (and want) to use them. However, a simple and effective timeline can be created using nothing more than the "Table" feature in Microsoft Word. For example, for a six month Phase I SBIR project, you click on the Table key across the top menu in Word, then indicate you want 7 columns (one for each month of the project, plus one more for the task list), and however many rows are needed to cover your tasks plus a header (so if you are proposing four tasks, you would ask for five rows). Now type in your header titles (e.g., "Task, Month 1, Month 2," etc.) in the cells in the top row, and then type in abbreviations for your tasks in the cells in the first column. Now all you have to do is plug in something that shows when each task is being performed. You can use the Word draw function to show lines; insert x’s in the appropriate table cells (use left, center or right justification to indicate when during the month the task is being performed); or select symbols that you want to use to indicate the start and finish of each task, milestones, and other notable events like meetings with the agency technical representative.

A word of advice: if you are doing a timeline for a Phase II project, you probably don’t want to do a separate column for each of the 24 months in the effort. Instead, show one column for each quarter of a year, and therefore you will only have nine columns (eight for the two year’s worth of effort plus one for the list of tasks).

One other word of advice: you can increase the value of a timeline by adding an additional column to the right hand side in which you list the personnel (yours, as well as any consultants, universities, or Federal labs on the project) who will be involved in each task. Now the reader can readily see that Task 5, "Tally results and assess feasibility," will be performed in late month 5 and early month 6, and will be done by the PI and the consultant.

So timelines are important, they are powerful, and they are simple to do. Why not add one to your next SBIR/STTR Phase I or II proposal?