Agile Proposal Development: A Spotlight on Stakeholders

Last week I posted an article that discussed how proposal management is in actuality project management. I pointed out how our long-standing proposal best practices are Agile, and have been Agile long before Agile was the latest industry craze. I was so pleased with the discussion that this article sparked, including how this recognition can help us to improve how we develop proposals.

Over the next few weeks, I plan to build on some of these discussion points in a series of articles focused on how we can expand the application of Agile in our pursuit processes. This week I’ll take a deeper look at stakeholders, and how we can better integrate stakeholders into the business development lifecycle.




Stakeholders
Stakeholders are anyone outside of the team with vested interests in the working of the team and the products they develop. If you’ve worked on a proposal, you know there are many stakeholders involved, and their buy-in is critical to a successful proposal effort.

As with many projects, with proposals, we have both external and internal stakeholders. External stakeholders include the customer—acquisition professionals, contracting personnel, customer leadership, and customer end users, to name a few. Internal stakeholders include those individuals within our companies that are impacted by the proposal—these can be executive leadership, project personnel, or other decision makers. One major challenge of proposal, capture, and business development professionals is meeting the needs of both internal and external stakeholders.

External Stakeholders
As Al Pearce pointed out last week, Agile prioritizes iterative feedback from stakeholders and customers. And since source selection rules put significant restrictions on customer communications during the Final RFP phase, it's important to take full advantage of the Questions & Answer (Q&A) sessions.

However, not only is it important to take advantage of the Q&A sessions, it is critical to take the time to understand the customer stakeholder needs before the RFP is even released. Remember that building a relationship with our customer stakeholders and understanding their underlying concerns takes time. Without solid customer stakeholder relationships, we won’t have the opportunity to understand their programmatic concerns or determine what really keeps them up at night. Further, we won’t be able to develop solutions to meet their needs and vet those solutions prior to the RFP release. As Al pointed out, once the RFP is released, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) limits customer interaction—so at that point, it’s too late for effective opportunity shaping and solution vetting.

Internal Stakeholders
For the best results, internal stakeholders need to be involved throughout the opportunity pursuit process. It is essential to gain internal stakeholder buy-in at critical milestones, including pursuit decisions, strategy reviews, color team reviews, as well as formal milestone/gate reviews. As Jennifer Siler noted, it’s just not effective for internal stakeholders to jump in at the eleventh hour with opinions on content, pricing, or solution. By seeking internal stakeholder feedback and buy-in throughout the opportunity lifecycle, we can help avoid the last-minute chaos that can occur otherwise.

Final Thoughts
As we’ve pointed out, with Agile, success stems from iterative stakeholder feedback—and it’s no different with proposals. To increase our probabilities of win, we need to collaborate with our customer stakeholders frequently and early—and well before the RFP is released. Similarly, to minimize the hurdles of getting the proposal out the door, we need to collaborate with our internal stakeholders early and frequently as well. As our tried and true best practices have shown, this iterative stakeholder collaboration will support a smoother and much more successful proposal development process.


Written by Ashley Kayes, CP APMP
Senior Proposal Consultant, AOC Key Solutions, Inc. (KSI)
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-kayes-cp-apmp-a3750413/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

6 Strategies To Tackle Tight Page Limitations

Image
Tight page limitations are becoming a more frequent challenge as contracting officers continue to look for ways to streamline their acquisition processes. When faced with tight page restrictions, we often find ourselves struggling with trimming five pages of material into two pages of allocated space. However, sometimes the content we are working with is so long because it is simply overly wordy. Here are my tricks for removing the waste: Use Active Voice Eliminate Redundancies Strip out Empty Words Simplify Your Word Choice Use Graphics and Tables Strategically Focus Your Text 1. Use Active Voice. With active voice, the subject of the sentence comes first and performs the action in the sentence. Active voice is more straightforward and concise than passive voice. It typically results in shorter, sharper sentences. So not only does it take up less real estate, it flows better and is easier to understand. 2. Eliminate Redundancies. Remove redundancies that
Read more

10 Must-Know Proposal Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools of 2020

Image
Proposal automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are hot topics in the proposal field right now, particularly as we have transitioned to a largely remote workforce during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Some professionals have angst about the potential negative effects of these tools on the industry; however, many of us are more optimistic about the ways these tools can improve our work-life balance. As demonstrated by the number of Association of Proposal Management Professionals (APMP) Bid and Proposal Con 2019 vendors, many companies are already leveraging proposal automation tools and AI to streamline and enhance the proposal development and management processes. For example, some of these tools are beginning to enhance the response process by pre-populating outlines with “smart” content, some provide basic language and tone analysis, and others support the proposal management process with streamlined document management and control features. In this week’s article, I p
Read more

Back to the Basics: Why Using Transition Words is Critical in Proposal Writing

Image
In proposal writing, the goal is to convince the customer that your solution provides the greatest benefits through clear and concise narratives. However, because of limited resources and time, we often find ourselves rushing to piece together content from various sources (e.g., boilerplate content, past proposals, notes from SMEs). Then you get to Pink or Red team, and the reviewers provide unsurprising feedback: The writing doesn’t flow well The section seems choppy The writing is disjointed The problem? You probably didn’t go back and add the necessary transition words. Transition words serve to establish logical connections between the sentences, paragraphs, and sections of the proposal. Effective transitions enable the themes, strength statements, important features, and customer benefits to flow together. Transitions should occur at a variety of places in the response to form cohesive paragraphs and sections. The main types of transitions inc
Read more