How not to be small

Some large companies operate like a collection of small businesses and some small businesses never stop making it up as they go along. This produces companies that grow like weeds where everything is a constant struggle. How do you stop operating like you are small?

Having the same staff pursuing your opportunities while also building the structure to improve how people pursue your opportunities is problematical. That’s the nice way of saying it usually fails. Either you are taking them away from the pursuit at a risk to your win rate, or you are expecting them to complete the development effort “in between” pursuits, which never happens. You’re also expecting them to be able to integrate stakeholder groups with competing interests. Getting it right deserves more attention and pays off in improved return on investment.

The way we approach it is to break down the topics that the organization needs to work on and then create what is essentially a project plan. We have a template that we use for this. We also have the advantage of being able to draw from the huge amount of materials we have in PropLIBRARY. We combine:

• Online training
• Involvement of all stakeholders
• Creating process artifacts that the company will use for years
• Q&A and feedback

Then we create a monthly schedule based on the topics. And use the above as weekly topics. This balances any disruption to the organization while making steady progress to continuously improve win rate and ROI. It also enables us to quickly put in place what amounts to a project plan that addresses:

• Schedule
• Roles
• Goals
• ROI impact
• Metrics and measurements

This greatly mitigates risk and enables oversight to ensure that goals, including ROI targets, are met.

One way we’ve used this approach is to introduce capture to a company and roll it out over some number of months. Or to fix intractable problems that companies who have capture managers often still face. Another way it can be used is to help companies that are graduating from the 8(a) program. Starting about 18 months ahead of graduation, we can transform the entire organization from a dependency on set-asides to being ready for full and open competition.

What I like about this approach is that it is transformative without being disruptive, and that it enables companies to blend improving and learning with doing. This resolves many of the problems that companies struggle with, often for years. That struggle lowers your win rate and leaves money on the table. Fixing those problems pays for itself.