“First Learn Balance!”

 

Mr. Miyagi’s advice to Daniel in The Karate Kid also applies to the selection of strategies when it comes to attracting projects, programs, and portfolios. Project sponsorship is a tricky field of endeavor, and, if your organization is a novice to it, the other companies in the market will gang up and bully you right out of contention (though, hopefully, not while dressed in skeleton costumes).

In the last two weeks’ blogs, I reviewed opposite ends of the spectrum when approaching the problem of securing sufficient projects to not only keep your organization’s head above water, but to actually have it thrive. The first example involved a very large Beltway Bandit that placed extraordinary emphasis on increasing the number of jobs being credibly bid, while giving short-shrift to the existing project backlog and its performance.

This company went out of business.

Next, I examined another company I worked for, with the opposite problem: as a designated small, minority-owned business, a certain portion of the (U.S.) federal government’s procurement budget was “set aside” for companies with this designation, so that the projects would often be awarded to this organization with little or no effort on behalf of its proposal preparation team. However, the “set aside” status doesn’t last forever, and, when it expired…

This company also went out of business.

The trick, then, is to set up a management information system that can help inform the company’s decision-makers on which types of work ought to be pursued, from which customers, and how much of it should be in the proposal backlog. The first two are relatively easy – the third, well, isn’t. But I’ll give a primer on the look and feel of these MISs my best 700-800 word shot.

Which types of work should your company pursue? Which do you do best? Don’t bother asking the tenders of the general ledger for that one – if you don’t have (at least a rudimentary) Earned Value Management System covering your project work, you have a lot more problems than just the info feed for your strategic management system. If you do, this data point naturally falls out of it upon inquiring.

Ditto on which customers.

Now for the size of the targeted proposal backlog. Did anyone notice how I inserted the word “targeted” into the mix there? Yeah – clearly, simply bidding on everything that tickles the organization’s fancy that shows up on the Commerce Business Daily is a strategy for disaster. To best manage your company’s project sponsors, some handle on the following parameters is necessary:

·         Project performance, by type of work and customer

·         Size of the target market

·         Position of the competitors in that market

Then, an analysis that takes into account the organization’s position with respect to Asset, Project, and Strategic management will allow a clear vision on the strategic direction the company should take. It’s informed balance, the kind that can’t be attained by doing different-footed chicken-kicks off of Oceanside pillars.

Or, absent this insight, your organization could simply get the stuffing beat out of it by the Cobra Kai-trained competition.