Over the last couple of months there has been a robust discussion amongst GovCon proposal management practioners about applying Agile project methodologies to proposal management. This topic was presented by Maryann Lesnick, Principal Consultant of Lohfeld Consulting at the APMP DC Chapter meeting in November. You can download her presentation here. Her presentation is a thorough comparison of Agile Software Development Project Methodology with the world of Federal Government Proposal Management. It provides a very solid baseline and raises some provocative topics and questions.
The conversation was picked up in the APMP linkedin group. It is clear from the discussion that this is one of those topics that is open to debate and probably to personal preference. I got wind of this discussion and started looking at how we could translate this approach into our software solutions that support Proposal Management. We then turned to customers to discuss if the agile approach was relevant and got their input.
Through these conversations, we found that there are certain aspects of the Agile approach that are more standard amongst practioners than you might expect. In particular, the approach of Daily Standup Meetings which compare to the Daily Scrum approach of Agile. In the process of translating this approach into software we also uncovered some interesting places where Proposal Management practioners are perhaps even more Agile in their approach than the software folks. In this article, I’ll focus in on the use of the Daily Standup Meeting and translating this into software. I’ll also discuss some of the detailed best practices/realities that we uncovered that are down in the trenches where the work gets done.
The Base Agile Comparison
In the public discussion mentioned above the Agile Software process is compared to the Proposal Development process. A core element of agile is the idea of the Sprint – a time-boxed effort based upon a given set of requirements as objectives. In the proposal managers’ discussion they typically define or correlate the Sprint to the time between Color Reviews. This is a logical conclusion since Color Reviews, following the Shipley/Lohfeld approach is a known definition for proposals for Federal Government Contractors.
At first this definition and approach made sense to me. So, we decided to build out a Daily Standup Meeting feature for our solutions and show it to our customers. The idea is that we could bring all of the work onto one page so that the Proposal Manager could utilize the Daily Standup to very efficiently drive each Sprint (Color Review) to completion. A noble idea.
How reality is different?
Armed with our “beautiful” Daily Standup Meeting feature we started showing it to customers as a potential enhancement to their proposal systems. They liked it. But, as they really got to thinking about it, we uncovered three “inconvenient truths” amongst the practioners.
- First, they are almost never able to manage their sections and documents to have everything in the same ready state for a Color Team Review. This abstract state of perfection just doesn’t happen in reality.
- Second, Proposal Managers don’t ONLY manage sections/documents towards the goal of completion of Color Reviews. In addition, they track and manage each of the multiple turns between the writer and the designated reviewers for each section/document. In other words, the Proposal Managers are tightly watching each iterative turn of the Writer-Reviewers for each section. Within a Color Review Sprint they are managing an entire sub-set of Writer-Reviewer iterations. These determine the real state of readiness.
- Third, the Daily Standup Meetings are really used to manage each of these Writer-Reviewer iterations.
To the practioners, the above were almost obvious. When asked how they manage it, the answer is basically, with a lot of attention to detail and communication. They never really thought about having software to help them manage this. In this context, the Daily Standup Meeting is a great way to stay on top of these Writer-Reviewer iterations.
Translating this into Software
Now, to many of you the above may be obvious. The interesting part as a software builder is that in the standard software tools, including ours up to now, we didn’t do anything to make these Writer-Reviewer iterations easy to track and manage. It has simply been a gap filled by the hard work of the Proposal Manager.
So, we went back to our Daily Standup Meeting enhancement and built in the ability to track and manage each of these Writer-Reviewer turns and make it a snap to log the status of each turn. Note that since we found that the level of readiness didn’t track directly to the Color Reviews, this sub-level is really the actual baseline of readiness that you can now manage. Our new Daily Standup Meeting feature is now starting to hit the mark of reality with the practioners.
Our plans are to offer this to our customers in February as an enhancement to WinCenter, IDIQ Task Order Management and their native SharePoint proposal environments.
You are more Agile than You Think
This has been an interesting experience for us. I’ve provided software solutions for customers across many industries over many years. One of the intriguing aspects of Proposal Management in the Federal Government Contractor space is that you do have a high level, structured, process approach that is well understood and proven to work. The Color Team approach is almost unique in business development across industries. It works because of the structured nature of the Federal Government acquisition process. However, while on the surface there is a great deal of structure, a level down where the real work gets done, your process and best practices are a lot more Agile than is generally acknowledged. Really good Proposal Managers are able to pull off changes across their “product” (the proposal) midstream when amendments or insights or edicts arise. If you tried to change the requirements in the middle of a Sprint for a Software Development project you’d have a rebellion. I’ve been there.
In addition, this experience also tells me that there is a lot more that your software systems can do to help you in your work. So, keep having these discussions and we’ll do our best to keep up.
william