If it’s broke… fix it! Ensuring A High Quality Proposal Experience

2. If it’s broke… fix it! Ensuring A High Quality Proposal Experience Tina Scogin, CF APMPSr. Capture Manager Monday, May 28, 2015

3. First things first….

4. Why We’re Here Today… • How I found myself with a high win rate, a broken proposal process, and a gaggle of angry villagers. • Digging myself out and the lessons I learned along the way. • Today’s Takeaway: Learn and inspire each other by brainstorming solutions to problems. Are there any unique problems left in the proposal world?

5. About Me • 25+ yrs’ experience. • 18 in Federal Proposal Land. • All positions. • Most of the large, a few medium, one commercial, a non-profit, and now a small. Really small.

6. Commonality Proposal Department vs Everyone Else, but without the cool dance routines.

7. The Situation • Challenges: • Leveraging strengths and weakness led to shortcuts. • Too busy to document or educate. • Exhaustion leads to questionable decisions and bad moods. • Our proposal response team of four was exactly the same, even as the company grew 4x bigger.

8. Turning Over a New Leaf • Boss’ Request: • Gain efficiencies. • Ensure scalability. • Mitigate delivery risk. • Give management visibility into the pipeline.

9. Steps to Identifying What’s Broken Determine what works and why. Define success. Determine how you want to be measured. Identify any risk and potential consequences. Perform gap analysis. Develop a plan of action.

10. Then What? • Validate My Hypothesis. • Go big or go home: • Biggest bang for your buck. • Pick the biggest rock. • Show my boss a quick success that demonstrated that I could drive a change.

11. Disrupting My Status Quo • Removed the emotion. • Using the Native’s language. • What was my contribution to fixing it? • Offense versus Defense. • Outcome-based versus Product-based. • Best Value versus LPTA.

12. Example | Red Team Reviews • Problem: • Reviewers always complained about the lost day. Didn’t feel it was effective. • Feedback was constructive, but didn’t provide the level of detail that was most impactful to the Authors. • Some portion (usually 1/3 to 1/2) of the proposal never even read/reviewed. • Red Team lasted several hours more than it should have taken and Debrief took hours more. • Tough to get people to agree to give up that much of their week. • Your ideas?

13. Example | Red Team Reviews • How We Solved It: • Redefined Red Team from a Review into a Workshop. • Scheduled moved up 1 day for all tasks in order for Reviewers to read sections the night before. • Reviewers now show up and spend 6 hours discussing their concerns and ideas; and 1 hour debriefing. • Take Away: • Having everyone clearly articulate what the actual challenge was and be part of the solution ensured early adoption. • Most important, we created a positive proposal experience for all concerned.

14. Example | Competing Cooks • Problem: • Confusing, vague, and contradictory RFx language resulted in Authors and writing team having to make interpretive decisions on direction. • Too many opinionated, knowledgeable, qualified cooks in the kitchen providing direction and making decisions. • Key stakeholders being absent until the day (or two) before something was due and swooping in at the last moment with a different interpretation that required redoing the entire solution. • Your Ideas?

15. Example | Competing Cooks • How We Solved It: • Created a position called Proposal Sponsor. Each of the Key Cooks In the Kitchen are available as Sponsor. • In the initial Go/No Go Meeting, we assign a single Sponsor. • The others who are NOT Sponsors are relegated to Reviewers. • Sponsors are responsible for making decisions regarding direction, signing off on the solution, and explaining all direction decisions to the non-Sponsors. • Take Away: • By clearly tying the problem to a risk with potential consequences, management was able to easily assign a priority to fixing the problem. • Working with everyone on a solution we could all live with resulted in early adoption with no speed bumps.

16. What I Learned • Proposals are an integral part of the entire business lifecycle. • What’s the business impact of NOT changing. • Everyone wants to be successful. • Invite everyone into the pool. • Rather than focusing on proposal pain points, focus on how to improve the proposal experience. • Focus on better outcomes, not better products. • Get creative. • What works for Delivery might just work for proposals.

17. Building on My Success • Picked the next two things to work on, rinse repeat. • Started documenting. • My audience responds to sound bites, not books. • Tools for everything. • Changed lessons learned into Workshops. • Solving challenges before they became problems.

18. Survey Issue: No Time To Fix It • Issue: • I walked into a mess (no process, no repository, no usable content), I don't have time to clean everything up and respond to all of the new bids coming in. • most individuals are focused on execution of current contracts; don't want to be bothered with anything else. • Want: Including everyone in the process development discussion, creating a repository • Ideas?

19. Example | Pink Team Reviews • Problem: • 2 week response timeframe didn’t not allow for effective storyboarding. • Every review resulted in a brand new rewrite of most sections. • Most writers were unprepared for Pink Team (too busy to prepare). • Small TO props didn’t even have a Pink Team, first time content was seen was at Red. • Your Ideas?

20. Example | Pink Team Reviews • How We Solved It: • Redefined Pink Team. Authors develop annotated outlines following a storyboard-esque template adding sufficient notes for others to review and provide feedback. • Book Boss presents his approach to that volume. • Authors present their plans for their sections • Reviewers: authors, stakeholders, opinionators, and Red Team Reviewers • Reviewers read all materials night before and come prepared to discuss and workshop through ideas. • Sponsors are Pink Captains. • All sessions are voice recorded to help authors post Pink. • Take Away: • By involving everyone upfront, we have reduced time spent writing and rewriting; and increased the quality of the proposal experience.

21. Example | Frankenstein’s Author • Problem: • Not enough proposal contributors or authors. • Not all meeting participants participated because they assumed we “got” it all. • Everyone understood their piece of the project, but not the solution as a whole. • Contributors didn’t understand how to proposalate. • Everyone defined the word “solution” differently. • Your Ideas?

22. Example | Frankenstein’s Author • How We Solved It: • Developed a roadmap template with instructions. • Crafted an A-Z CONOPS, where each slide is a specific step. • Set up Half Day or All Day (depending on proposal size) Workshops that everyone has to participate in, while they fill in the Solution Template. • One person designated as the Official Devil’s Advocate. • Post Workshop, attend Debrief where the solution team articulates the entire solution approach to the Sponsor prior to any writing. • Take Away: • Clear instructions in sound bites allowed everyone to know what was expected and get the best contribution out of everyone. • Re-engineered tools and templates to get the best out of people unfamiliar with how to develop proposal content freed up my time and still led to high quality products.

23. Survey Issue: Educating The Masses • Issue: • Process is either loosely defined, not followed by everyone in the department, or not respected/adhered to by external stakeholders. • People disagree on or don't follow process throughout a project, leading to confusion throughout which is amplified in the production phase. • Inexperienced proposal team • Want: Processes being better understood and respected by all stakeholders. • Ideas?

24. Example | Late to the Game • Problem: • Only large, program-level opportunities had critical visibility early on. Task orders were often discussed 1-2 weeks ahead of any RFx. • Proposal support team finding out about opportunities too late in the process to be effective. • Had to No Go great opportunities because there wasn’t enough time to get done what needed to be done behind the scenes (contract updates). • A lot of information not captured anywhere. Information in Sales Reps heads or notebooks. • Your Ideas?

25. Example | Late to the Game • How We Solved It: • Developed a Workbook to capture all the information in one place. • Established Gate Reviews well in advance of any RFIs or Draft RFP. • Use the Workbook to guide all status meetings. Record all tasks and notes in projected Workbook. • Because Management is looking at the Workbooks to lead discussions, Sales Reps are held accountable to keeping the information up to date. • Take Away: • Its easier to enforce a rule when you have the support of your customer’s boss. By developing a solution that has a clear benefit to them, they support all my less popular decrees. • No more last minute explanations to Sales on why its not that you don’t want to pursue, but we cannot pursue due to X, Y, Z reasons. • Management is now able to see the benefit (pwin) of each opportunity and make better decision early regarding the pipeline and resourcing.

26. Wrap Up • The proposal department is part of the business model, not separate. • Mitigate risk and solve problems. • Improve your ROI. • Continuously improve. • Engaging people in issue resolution discussions creates advocates, creative solutions, and immediate buy-in. • Determine how you define success and use lessons learned to measure and report.

27. Thank you all for your time.

28. #APMP2016

29. Tina Scogin Sr. Capture Manager Govplace, Inc. 1886 Metro Center Dr, St 100 Reston, VA 20190 tscogin@govplace.com #APMP2016

30. Contact Us APMP PO Box 77272 Washington, DC 20013-7272 Phone: (866) 466-2767 +1 (202) 507-6390membership@apmp.org www.apmp.org #APMP2016