In This Chapter

“Best begun is half done.” Albert Einstein said it, but it’s probably best remembered as something Mary Poppins said. And how true this is for your newly won program! You won the contract because you proved you were the best, but you’re only half done. Getting off on the right foot with your new customer at the beginning of program implementation is the way to build a lasting and mutually beneficial relationship. On the other hand, stumbling badly in the first few days and weeks of your new contract can create a deep hole you may never get out of.

So here you learn how to get your new program off to a good start with some specific techniques to help get you through the difficult first few weeks and months by making the most of the important debriefings you have coming and to create and execute the start-up plan between the old way of doing business and the way required for your contract.

Sad to say, you’d be surprised at the failure of even large and supposedly sophisticated companies to take full advantage of the government’s requirement to conduct a meaningful debriefing of your proposal. But because you’re reading this book, you know better and should make these suggestions a part of your standard policies and procedures.

The time to obtain a commitment to a meaningful debriefing is before you create the proposal, not after it. Your customer relationship staff should arrange for a face-to-face meeting with the government program manager or even a higher authority. (Your best guess at the Source Selection Authority—the person who is actually going to make the procurement decision—is a good start.) Of course, you must do this well before the curtain goes down on customer contact, at which point you can deal only with the government’s Contracting Officer (KO). Typically, this is three months or maybe six weeks before the solicitation comes out.

In your pre-solicitation KO meeting, you should cover the following three points:

Be sure you’re planning to bid on a specific opportunity before you have this meeting. You can’t claim to have firm plans to bid and not bid. Failing to keep your word leaves a bad impression with your customer’s own management and makes everything you say open to question. As in all dealings with your customer, be truthful, and make your word your bond.

The government is good about doing debriefings even though there’s a suspicion that the KOs would just as soon be doing almost anything other than performing this task. These two rules apply to all debriefings.

The only way to get better is to learn from your hits and misses. Insist on, and carry through with, debriefings.

The basic considerations are when should you obtain a debriefing, who should do it, what data should you ask for, and how widely should you disseminate these results within the organization.

The correct answers are, in short:

For single-award opportunities, only two grades are given: A and F. An important weakness in the proposal practices of many firms when the grade is F is the lack of a formal, recorded, and disseminated debrief by the customer as to why the firm’s proposals lost. The practice may not exist at all or perhaps be focused on getting information to the proposal team, specifically to program manager and/or the proposal manager.

Sometimes, but not often, such debriefings are in the context of a potential protest or even an actual protest.

Psychologically, a debriefing after losing a contract award is a tough task. The tendency is to perform various mental gymnastics to “make right” your proposal and your proposal team. The company has quite often invested what is a considerable amount of money, not to mention hopes and dreams, in bidding an opportunity. The proposal team members have devoted considerable personal and professional energy in the proposal effort—nights, weekends, travel—and extensions of their professional and organizational skills are typical. In the absence of hard data, all sorts of reasons may be manufactured to explain the loss. That is all the more reason to press on, to expend what some will claim is good money after bad to make a trip to the customer’s place of business and obtain a thorough, professionally conducted debriefing.

Although debriefing after a loss can be painful, a thorough debriefing of proposal losses has value with the customer, can give valuable information about a competitor, and therefore result in better future proposals.

The customer may cooperate in a debriefing for you, as a loser, only because he is required to do so. But your positive, professional conduct in a well-conducted debriefing can raise your company’s image with the customer. Asking for a debriefing says several things to the customer on behalf of your company:

Let’s take the opposite scenario: you fail to ask for a debriefing. What impression is left with the customer by a company that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to submit a proposal and then doesn’t care enough about the customer, and about its own work, to obtain a relatively inexpensive feedback session? The short answer is: the impression is not positive.

The previous section may incorrectly indicate that debriefings are done primarily for cosmetic reasons, but that is not so. They can reveal major weaknesses in the proposals that are either not apparent at all or have a greater import on decision-making by the customer than you thought they would. Although the case considered here is a general case, if you knew you had a major weakness in a part important to the customer, why did you bid at all? That statement supports the proposition that your company collectively believed that the part was not a weakness or that the customer would overlook the weakness as relatively unimportant.

For example, the customer may tell you clearly that the technology proposal you thought was great was significantly inferior. Although this may bruise the ego of the technical guru who championed this solution, it is absolutely vital for you and your company to know this. This information influences your future bids with this customer. And you will then probably come to know the solution really favored by the customer and whether the winning company had that solution. So now you have two pieces of useful information: one on the customer and the other on the competition.

The careful listener may pick up on the customer’s hopes, fears, and biases at a time when there is less reluctance than usual for the customer to reveal that information. The customer representative, a human being like you and your representatives, realizes the amount of effort and money that went into even the poorest proposal and probably wishes to encourage you to try again and to do better in the future. The customer, particularly in the current competition situation, has every incentive to encourage bidders and no incentive to discourage future proposals.

Once you get past the debriefing, it’s time for the handoff between the proposal team—the authors of your winning proposal—and your newly minted program team. The proposal team has created a wonderful proposal. Well, maybe not wonderful but at least good enough to win. The proposal team has carried you and your company through all the post-submission activities: responded to customer questions, perhaps conducted an oral briefing for the customer, responded to the call for a Best and Final Offer (BAFO) with perhaps a better price, and waited, likely impatiently, for what seemed an eternity for the customer’s decision on the contract award. Now that you’ve won, it’s time to hand off the responsibility for the program from the proposal team to the program team.

In Chapter 14, you learned that the first high-risk time in the business development cycle is at the handoff between the relationship manager/capture manager and the proposal manager. At that handover, continuity of personnel makes all the difference—good continuity, low-risk handoff. Bad continuity is a high-risk handoff; it’s all about relationships and continuity.

Now you face another high-risk handoff, and here’s where the importance of having the program manager-designate as an integral part of the proposal team pays off. Because this individual has been present at the creation, it’s now possible to make a (relatively) seamless transition from proposal to program activities. Because the program manager-designate knows the proposal inside-out, up, and down, the transfer is much easier than having a program manager not involved with the proposal begin program execution. In these circumstances, the newly designated program manager starts at a distinct disadvantage.

Transitioning from proposal team to program team is one of two high-risk times in business development.

The most critical part of your proposal now becomes your program plan. On the basis of this plan, as modified, you will manage your program. In addition, your customer will “grade” your performance on that plan. So it’s of the greatest importance and the greatest urgency that you meet with the customer to transform a proposal program plan into an executable program plan.

If you’ve planned correctly (and this instruction in the solicitation is difficult to miss), your proposal plan will show a meeting between you, the contractor, and the customer’s program people to start honing in on the real program plan. This meeting is usually set for about the fifth day of the program, where the first day is the program start date. Clever name, don’t you agree? This meeting is called the “Program Kickoff” or something similar. Starting with that meeting, you will have about five working days to make all the changes, negotiate out any differences, and present a revised and improved program plan, which is now subject to a final review by the customer and then approved as amended. This is the new baseline plan, the one that you’re going to begin executing against.

Some government program managers don’t clearly understand the difference between a) the program plan you submitted as a part of the winning proposal and b) the program plan you’re now going to use during the program execution. The difference is that the program plan you’ve created now and which the government program manager has approved, is much more detailed. You’ve replaced generalities with specifics.

If your customer has a problem understanding the differences, you can preface your final program plan with the following explanation. Note that “our” or “we” means the winning contractor and “you” or “your” means the government customer.

You probably submitted several plans with your proposal, including:

These are now subject to the same negotiations, revisions, and approval as the program plan. You always begin with the program plan, as it’s the high-level one. All other plans depend, at least to some degree, on the program plan. Once the program plan is set, then the subordinate plans have what amounts to an effective anchor for their own delivery dates, for example.

So typically within the first 30 calendar days, you and your team will change not only the program plan but also all other subordinate and supplementary plans from “as proposed” to “ready for execution.”

Getting started with your new contract is often the most difficult part. You have new members of your own team (including members of the subcontractors), and you have new individuals on the government side. Irrespective of any previous good relationships you’ve had with your own team members and the government program people, it takes a while to know how to operate, on a day-to-day basis, with this new group of people.

There are two different cases, which are related but distinctly different.

In this situation, you’ll probably have some time to come up to speed in the operation. As you phase in, the outgoing contractor phases out. Here the personal relationships come to the fore. I advise you to develop very good interpersonal relationships with the outgoing contractor, because it’s likely that the incumbent is disappointed about being an unsuccessful offeror to succeed itself in the position.

Not often does the incumbent fail to bid any recompetitions, so you’re going to have to deal with an incumbent still smarting from the loss. And many losers are also sore losers, perhaps with good reason. The outgoing crew may well be resentful and unhappy about losing. Further, the individuals may feel justified in taking out their disappointment on you and your company, with or without reason. So be it. Your job remains to strive for a smooth hand-off from them to you, and a smooth change is more likely if you strive for good interpersonal relationships.

Case two is often easier. All you have to contend with is trying to start up a new program when you’re probably at least to some extent dependent on the promised Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). For example, you’re planning to use government-supplied office space and information technology infrastructure. What happens to your program if the required information technology (IT) equipment does not show up on time at the right place? What if it doesn’t work as anticipated in your program plan? The cooperative answer is that you’ll do a workaround to accomplish as much of your work as possible, even in the absence of the promised resources.

As in all such circumstances, you may have to do the best you can for a few days. If you do, and you’re on a tight schedule, document any problems related to your government partner’s failure to provide certain equipment. Don’t do this documentation in a punitive way or for a cover-yourself reason. However, do keep a current record of exactly what happened, from your viewpoint, and be ready to ask for an equitable adjustment based on the government’s revised requirements. Wandering too far from the contract terms, and especially the statement of work, is dangerous to you as the contractor. You are legally obligated to do the work described in the contract and only that work. If you routinely do work outside that prescribed scope, you are in danger of not being paid for that unauthorized work. Remember that the contract can be changed only through a formal change, as approved and supervised by the KO, and not as specified by the government program manager.

There are specialists in accomplishing smooth start-ups running transition plans, and you should carefully consider engaging an individual or a small team if your budget and the size of the program warrant such a specialist. For example, if you’re taking over a large support contract, a cadre of individuals, who have done similar start-ups for years, can come onto your team (usually as short-term contractors) and apply specialized knowledge to get you through the first 45 to 60 days of the program.

The field of such people is limited to those individuals having extensive experience doing just that. These people are typically retired, or semi-retired. They are often very well qualified and anxious to take on the challenges of this role. Your best way to find them is usually by word of mouth among experienced program managers. Use your own sources first. If you’re not successful, you can post your need for such a skill on Craig’s List or other local job board. These people just seem to appear.

Using a start-up specialist can be a great idea as it ensures you have the best chance at a smooth start-up. As an accompanying benefit, it takes the burden off the program manager at a time when that individual has plenty to do, even without worrying about achieving a smooth start-up.

Whether you call in a specialist or a team of specialists, never forget the role of program manager still takes precedence.

Your program manager-designate is no longer the designate. The new title and role is program manager, for real! This person now takes over the duties as described in your proposal. An important refinement (not a change, but a refinement) is that, if you bring on a start-up specialist, your (permanent) program manager should rely on the specialist to guide the special, nonrecurring tasks, such as hiring some of the incumbent contractor’s people if that’s part of the deal. All the while, the program manager should be the single point of contact with the government program manager in order to execute a tight, smooth start-up plan.

The Least You Need to Know