My proposal writing tools

As I have been focusing on writing proposals in the past years, I have developed a fair amount of tools that serve for each proposal, and help me remain organized in the preparation stage.

Here are the five tools I use most:

• I have a spreadsheet in which I have an overview of all the activities (often organized in work packages and tasks) versus all participants, to check who is going to spend how many hours or months on which activity. I use this sheet to organize the total number of hours to be billed, the see the equality of breakdown between the different work packages, to see if all tasks get a similar amount of time assigned to them ( or if there are differences, if these align with the description of the task), and to transfer this over to the budget.
• I have an overall table that I start from when I write a concept note. The table summarizes the main features of the call, and to this table I add my main objective, then split it out into about three specific objectives written in the SMART format, associated key performance indicators to identify how we will show that the objectives are met, and based on that I identify about five or six major components of the methodology.
• I have a number of internal sheets from both my universities to estimate budgets. Of course, each budget needs to be developed in correspondence with the internal guidelines and approved by the administration, but to get started with an estimate for the budget, such a budget is always useful. I also have tools for myself to map all the person months versus costs to see if there is a good balance between partners, and to see where I need to make adjustments if the budget does not fit within the maximum.
• I have a planning document, in which I write down the planning for writing the proposal. I have a template that I reuse, as most proposal require the same steps in the process.
• Very similarly, I have a task list of things that need to be done for the proposal, of which I have a template, for tasks that recur in all proposals.

These are the tools I have developed to organize my proposal writing stage. What do you use to streamline writing?