Chapter 18
Contract Award and Performance
The long road that defines the business acquisition life cycle comes to an end at contract award. All the hard work and scheming, late nights at the office, and enormous expenditure of corporate energy either culminate in victory or end in defeat. You either win or lose. There are no silver medals for a valiant effort. Few business experiences are more frustrating and disheartening than losing a proposal, especially a major effort in which you have invested months or even years. On the other hand, there is no substitute for the sense of exhilaration and accomplishment that comes from a winning effort.
The key is to win consistently. That has been the purpose of this book: to show you how to gain competitive advantage, maximize the application of your B&P resources, and dance in the winner’s circle far more often than you experience the sting of defeat.
Contract award indeed terminates the acquisition life cycle for the current opportunity. Yet there are still a few things you can do to gain advantage for the next time you step into the competitive arena.
The first order of business is to celebrate your victory. If you win a small contract, have a big celebration. If you win a big contract, have a bigger celebration. If you work in a small company, have a company-wide celebration. If you work in a large company, at least have a division-wide celebration. Winning competitive proposals is the lifeblood of organizations that rely on business from the federal government. I cannot think of a single business event that merits a celebration more than winning a new contract.
Actually, there are two good functional reasons for celebrating your proposal victories. First, celebrations highlight the importance of proposal efforts to the whole organization. This can foster interdepartmental cooperation for future proposal efforts. I find that people on the periphery of proposals often fail to support proposals adequately because they neither understand their importance nor accept the sense of urgency demanded by proposal team members.
Second, people who work on proposals rarely receive just compensation for their efforts. Using a celebration party to publicly acknowledge the valiant efforts of the proposal team in front of their peers and managers helps overcome this shortcoming. Proposal team members cannot put praise in the bank or use it to pay their mortgages. Nonetheless, it goes a long way toward enticing them back for a repeat performance in the future.
POST-AWARD DEBRIEFINGS
A cardinal sin in the proposal business is failing to understand clearly why you won or lost. There is a tendency to view winning proposals as exemplary efforts that need to be repeated and losing proposals as bad efforts to be avoided in the future. Such logic has surface validity but may betray the facts.
If you look back on your school days, you may recall an incident where you performed well but received a less-than-stellar grade because the teacher graded on a curve and the competition was tough. Alternatively, you may remember an experience where your performance was not so great yet you received a good grade because the class was full of dullards.
Proposals, too, are graded on the curve. You may submit a terrible proposal and still win because the competing proposals were even more terrible than yours. Or you may submit a great proposal that loses to fierce competition. Retaining the winner as a future model or discarding the loser would be an error in either case. Gain competitive advantage for the future by knowing why you won or why you lost. The starting point is to ask the government for a debriefing of the source selection evaluation results.
Win or lose, always request a debriefing as soon as you have been notified of contract award or have been eliminated from the competition. Make your request in writing to the contracting officer within three days of being notified. All bidders are entitled to a debriefing, at which the government will furnish the basis for the selection decision and contract award. Government debriefings may be done orally, in writing, or by any other method acceptable to the contracting officer. If the debriefing is oral, you should still be able to get a hard copy of the briefing slides.
Making the Most of a Debriefing
Evaluation debriefings vary between government agencies and sometimes within the same agency. According to the FAR, the government is required to provide at least the following information:
The government’s evaluation of the significant weaknesses or deficiencies in the offeror’s proposal, if applicable
The overall evaluated cost or price (including unit prices) and technical rating, if applicable, of the successful offeror and the debriefed offeror, and past performance information on the debriefed offeror
The overall ranking of all offerors, when any ranking was developed by the agency during source selection
A summary of the rationale for award
For acquisitions of commercial items, the make and model of the item to be delivered by the successful offeror
Reasonable responses to relevant questions about whether the government followed the source selection procedures contained in the solicitation, applicable regulations, and other applicable authorities.
The government is restricted from providing details of any competitor’s technical approach or divulging any company proprietary information. If you won, you can piece this information together after contract award through future interactions with the customer. Also, use marketing to dig into the details of your competitors’ bids. Persistent efforts to obtain this information will usually be successful. Few people are overly concerned with revealing the details of a losing effort. After all, what is there to protect?
If you lost the bid, immediately request a copy of the resulting contract and a copy of the source selection decision document. You can request the information yourself or employ one of the companies that provide this service. The contract will provide CLIN prices for the winning bid. You can request a copy of the winning proposal, but don’t expect to receive anything of value. The winner is allowed to delete anything considered proprietary, which typically covers its entire technical proposal.
Use the results of the debriefing along with a copy of the winning contract, plus whatever other information you can assemble, to analyze your bid against those submitted by the other competitors. If you won, work to arrive at a clear understanding of how and why. What did you do that was better, cleverer, cheaper, faster, more reliable, etc., than the other competitors? What were your strengths and weaknesses compared to the competition’s? If you lost, you must determine how the winner was able to beat you. Did they bid a significantly lower price? If so, determine what they did to arrive at that price. If they did not win on price, determine what they did to win and how they did it.
The best time to start the post-award analysis is as soon as you have enough data to reach some meaningful conclusions. You might need to continue collecting information for several months before you really know how you won or lost. Open a file for each award and maintain it until you are convinced that you clearly understand the reasons why you won or lost. This may sound like a lot of work, but it really is not. The key is to continue collecting information, most of which should come from your own marketing and program personnel. If you fail to understand why you won, you might not be able to repeat this feat in the future. If you fail to understand why you lost, you risk repeating a losing strategy.
Gain competitive advantage. Invest the effort. Piece together the puzzle so you understand the key factors that led to contract award. Then use them to gain advantage on the next bid opportunity.
Proper Behavior at a Government Debriefing
Throughout this book I have provided guidance about proper conduct in front of the customer. Attending a debriefing after you lose can be a trying experience, so some pointers for this inauspicious occasion are in order. Recall that you should always attempt to leave the customer with a favorable impression of your organization.
Your purpose at a debriefing is to obtain as much information as you can about the evaluation. Demonstrating your displeasure with the evaluation or the customer’s award decision will not accomplish that objective. In addition, you want to show your continued interest in future customer programs. Therefore, vent your anger and frustration before you attend the debriefing. Work through all the rationalization that accompanies losing. Reconcile yourself to the fact that you lost because another bidder did something better, smarter, or cheaper or took more risk than you did. Your job is to collect enough information to prevent a repeat performance.
Stay calm during the debriefing. Getting angry will only detract from your primary mission. Moreover, government attendees will be very reluctant to share more than the minimum information if you appear hostile. You should display a gracious attitude of wanting to find out what you did wrong and how you can do better in the future. This can be difficult. I have attended debriefings where I thought I would have to bite off the end of my tongue to keep from saying something unpleasant. Also, do not take your contracts manager or legal counsel to the debriefing unless you have already decided to formally protest the award. Multiple and apparently valid reasons can be made to justify including contracts in the debriefing. Nonetheless, doing so will only give the government attendees a quick case of lockjaw. In the end, you will receive far less information than you would otherwise have received.
Be prepared for the possibility that evaluators may have failed to understand or interpret accurately what you proposed, or erroneously attributed a shortcoming to your proposal that was not there. At this point it does not matter whether the error was yours or theirs. Try to create a comfortable atmosphere with the government evaluators. Get them talking and keep them talking for as long as you can. This will enable you to meet your objective of collecting information and will leave behind a good impression.
The same rules apply when you attend a debriefing after you win. Of course, it is much easier to be friendly and gracious under these circumstances. Your objective is still to collect as much information as possible. Find out what the customer liked and did not like about your proposal. Ask what you could do in the future to improve your proposal product or to make the customer’s job easier.
CLOSEOUT
A few housekeeping chores are necessary to close out proposal activities for the current bid opportunity. First, archive the entire proposal file for future reference. If you maintain a proposal library, then add files from the current proposal to the appropriate areas of your proposal database library. Add the results of the evaluation debriefing to whatever file you maintain for this type of data. Update your competitor database with information you gain from the debriefing and your analysis of the contract award. If you are not finished with your post-award evaluation, keep this file open until the information is complete.
Finally, open a file for the new program win. Coordinate with the program manager to establish the basic information for the file, and brief the program manager on his or her responsibility to update the file periodically. This will help support the preparation of subsequent past performance volumes.
The closeout portion of the proposal process might seem like an unlikely place to find opportunities to gain competitive advantage. Yet the post-evaluation assessment of why you won or lost can yield invaluable data to guide your next bid effort. Knowledge of why you lost is a critical prerequisite to building a winning strategy in the future. Likewise, use information about why you won to validate your bid strategy development process, improve your next effort, and prepare for a repeat performance.
When you win, the second aspect of gaining competitive advantage is performing well on the ensuing contract. Past performance is a key evaluation factor for most government procurements. Exemplary contract performance affords an obvious opportunity to delight your customer and gain the high road competitively for future bids.