In This Chapter

The management volume is your chance to show the customer how you actually plan to manage the program you’re proposing to carry out. Your technical volume as described in Chapter 16 might lay out an impressive solution to a problem the government is facing, but unless you can deliver on that solution, the technical volume may as well be used to line bird cages. So it’s critical to know what goes into the management volume, how to organize it, and how to avoid common mistakes. This chapter helps you deal with these things.

As you read this chapter, you may want to refer to Appendix C to see a sanitized (all identifying information removed) version of a real solicitation for the management volume. The requirements included in that sample solicitation are what drive the response suggestions we describe in this material.

The evaluators of your proposal will find it moderately interesting that you have successfully managed programs of this size and type before. The evaluators think it’s great that you can cite past performance on contracts similar in size, scope, and complexity. If you have no significant past performance citations, it’s often acceptable to cite the past performance of your subcontractors. However, read the solicitation carefully because it’s not always acceptable to use your subcontractors for past performance citations.

The crucial question you must answer is how you are planning to manage this program. Do you know enough about the peculiarities of this program to give the evaluators confidence that you have a grasp of the risks found in this program? The management volume is your opportunity to convince the evaluators that your team can deliver the products on time and at or under the budgeted cost.

The management volume is often the difference that separates winners from losers in the competition. Solicitations often appear to focus on who can offer the best technical solution. In fact, these are often really management competitions, just disguised as a technical shoot-out.

The management plan or management approach, as you describe it in the management volume, is particularly relevant for programs that will last over many years. The customer knows that the quality of the management solution, including most importantly management processes, more clearly determines the success of multi-year programs than any immediate technical superiority. So the offeror presenting a management approach that is flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances has a much better shot at winning than does an offeror with a whiz-bang short-term technical approach but no evidence of flexibility in the management solution.

Government customers seek constructive partnerships with their contractors, especially for complex and lengthy programs. To enhance your chances of winning the contract, you must present a management solution high in well-defined processes that feature openness and stress specific ways that you will bring the customer into close cooperation with you and your people. For example, solutions that base the management volumes on the premise that all bases are covered, the offeror makes no mistakes, and everything is going to go just swimmingly, are simply not believable. Evaluators will assign a high risk to such plans. Winning plans are based on the reality that in fact, bad things will happen. Only through an open partnership and spirit of collaboration can customer and contractor return to the desired track. So the real questions are:

If you can answer these important questions clearly and convincingly in your management volume, then it will serve you well on the road to a win.

The details of the solicitation dictate the content and organization of your management volume (see Chapter 14 for a full discussion of this process). Whatever else the customer requires, how you plan to organize your program is of keen interest to the evaluators. So let’s take a look at a convenient and efficient way of describing that “how.” (Again, the organization of your response must be in accordance with the solicitation’s instructions.)

In many different ways, the customer asks about how you plan to organize your people to achieve the customer’s goals. In some solicitations, the customer may not care or want to know how you’re going to do the work. But except for very simple programs, the customer wants to know, and needs to know, how you’re going to do the job. So a nearly universal request is to show how you plan to manage the program. In other words, they want you to describe your management plan. You’ll find two common clues in a solicitation that should trigger you to write about your management plan:

Each solicitation is different, and therefore your response (or better, your solution). But the vast majority of solicitations want to know that you have a plan for accomplishing the work. The language used in the solicitation you’re responding to might be different, and the exact request will be tailored to the specifics of the solicitation, but the resulting, net request remains the same. The customer simply wants to know you’ve got a plan, and what your plan looks like.

If you’ve found the clues and know you need to lay out your management plan, then you need to structure it around three main topics. These topics are usually presented with visuals that answer the three questions the government evaluators have about your management plan. These are:

Answering these questions requires you to include three visuals in your management volume. These are:

The point here is that there is a flow-down from Top Management to the Program Manager and his or her team. The Program Organization describes, in some detail, just how the program manager’s organization is well suited to accomplishing the program objectives.

Include the first two visuals as part of a standard management solution. The third visual presents the real solution for how you plan to manage this specific program. The details of this visual must tie closely to the technical solution you are offering, so creating this visual requires close cooperation from, and coordination with, the authors of the technical volume.

Your management approach is very likely based on the management processes of a similar program. Or perhaps you are planning to rely on the management processes of a subcontractor to use in this program. In either event, you can legitimately claim that you have a “rolling start” in the execution of the management plan. You can strengthen your case by, for example, pointing out that you have contingency hires for certain critical positions. (Critical positions is a generic term; the term the government uses most often is key personnel.)

As part of this rolling start, you can prepare and show a visual displaying the characteristics, for example, of the work statement across the top (horizontal axis) and the personnel, by name, on the left column (vertical axis). Then show a crosswalk relationship between these individuals and the elements of the work statement. We call this a meatball chart because it looks like meatballs in the squares.

A good plan yields a good proposal and vice versa. So correctly and prominently saying that you have a plan—specifically a program plan—is a real plus for your proposal. Being realistic about how programs really go, the probability that you will be asked to execute that specific plan in all its glorious detail is nearly zero. However, don’t let this dissuade you from presenting a detailed plan as a part of your submission.

As a practical matter, one of the first milestones in your program execution is to meet with the customer and verify or reverify all the plans you’ve submitted.

One of the first activities in a new program is a meeting with your customer to discuss the details of your management plan. No matter how well you planned your program (and you did well enough to win!), there will be changes that reflect the differences between your management plan as a basis of award and the management plan you’ll actually execute. This is now an opportunity for you and the customer to begin to operate as a cooperative team to replace the offered plan with the real plan. You improve the plan, as a team, by replacing the best guesses available at the time of the solicitation with the best data now available. So the customer will require that you make changes in your plan.

Now is your chance, as the winning bidder, to suggest a “better idea,” insofar as you have truly better ideas. Yes, this is directly contrary to my previous admonition to avoid having a better idea and instead discuss his idea. That was true at offer time. But now that you’re the winner, it’s not only acceptable, but expected, that you come forward with at least some alternative approaches to accomplishing the work. Just remember that anything you recommend, and is accepted, must be followed by a change in the contract to reflect that change. And of course, if this is a more costly activity, you are entitled to an equitable adjustment in the contract.

The earlier reference to “we have a plan” is only partially correct. More often, your proposal will include the one program plan but also a list (sometimes short, sometimes long) of other plans. For a complex or large proposal, these plans could include a quality plan, technology refresh plan, logistics plan, configuration management plan, and deployment plan.

The really good news is that there’s now a requirement, and an opportunity, to replace each of these plans with a revised plan. These revisions will be based on better data provided by the customer. And it is also your own opportunity to improve the plans through tailoring to this specific customer’s wants. Again, now is the time to talk about any “better ideas” you may have to yield better results.

Here are two differences between having a better idea as an offeror, and as the winning contractor:

Do you see the difference between having a better idea as the offeror and a better idea as the contractor?

Now that you’ve learned about the two most common high-level questions:

Your response must show how your team, including all your subcontractors, has the ability to “step up” to the amount of work this contract might require. This necessitates your listing the subcontractors by roles and responsibilities. Your best solutions would have no single point of failure, which means your team has built-in redundancy—you plan to compete (on the basis of price and availability and quality) among your subcontractors for pieces of the work. And your subcontractors (at least some individuals within each company) should have the same kind of name and face recognition with the customer that your program manager has.

There are three major types of subcontract plans, and they are sometimes confused. The confusion may result from a poorly constructed solicitation, which could reflect the customer’s own confusion. The three types address three distinct objectives:

The above discussion is in the context of a specific proposal. You may well be required to submit other plans or give answers to other questions. You’re on your own for these, but always work in the context of what is by now an old friend: the Section L- Section M-Section C precedence (assuming, of course, these sections are a part of the solicitation).

As you prepare your management volume, consider this list of tips to follow and pitfalls to avoid.

The Least You Need to Know