This is the second of six articles in a series. This article focuses on an assessment of your capture health for Phase 1 - ID Opportunity and Make Initial Assessment. Please note that the initial release of this article in our April newsletter was updated a few days after release. Please revisit the April article to ensure you have the proper context for this and subsequent articles in this series.

The first article provided an overview of a five-phase capture process and a summary of a capture health assessment tool I refer to as the Capture Report Card. This and the four remaining articles in the series focus on the key objectives and assessment guidelines for each of the five phases.

The Capture Report Card is a tool that supports objective, timely, and comprehensive assessment of the health or status of a competitive business capture over the entire 5-phase life cycle. It provides for an assessment of ten (10) elements as shown below. The assessment is a self-evaluation by the capture lead(s) of what is being done or has been accomplished for each element compared to what should be active or completed at the time of the assessment. Everything associated with a competitive capture, from identification to award, is covered in one (and only one) of these 10 elements:

1. Opportunity Status / Past Performance
2. Customer Knowledge and Relationships
3. Win Strategy
4. Capture / Proposal Resources
5. Solution / Teaming
6. Competitor Assessment
7. Price-to-Win
8. Financial / Contract
9. Proposal Development
10. Program Readiness

For each phase, each of the 10 Report Card elements includes a variety of items or actions (referred to as assessment guidelines) associated with a competitive capture, showing what should be done during that phase. This series of articles provides assessment guidelines for each element, for each phase. While the guidelines I summarize are designed for a large, competitive bid, they can and should be tailored to fit any company’s process and/or to fit any competitive business capture activity.

The remainder of this article provides an overview Phase 1 (ID Opportunity and Make Initial Assessment) of our 5-phase capture process (shown below) followed by a discussion of the Report Card assessment guidelines for this phase.

Phase 1 Overview
During this phase, you identify and make an initial assessment of a possible opportunity to add to your pipeline. This initial phase is triggered by identification of a potential opportunity. There are many techniques used to identify opportunities. These might include attending advance program briefings by customer organizations, reviewing government budget plans, using information gleaned from interaction with current customers, using commercial industry watch services, and many more. Once an opportunity is identified, the initial focus is on assessing this opportunity to determine if it is real, if it fits your business, and if it is worth continued effort. This phase involves an early analysis of the opportunity, early customer interaction, and possible positioning. The objective is to gain accurate intelligence about the market, customer, funding, and potential competitors to make an informed decision to continue work on this opportunity, or at least to include it in your new business pipeline that shows potential bids with anticipated value and investment requirements over a multi-year timeframe.

The timeline for this phase may be relatively short, but may be built on months or years of market analysis, strategic planning, intelligence gathering, and customer relationship building. In a situation where the opportunity is a re-compete and you are the incumbent, this phase may be skipped. In short, this phase focuses on the following items:

• Does it fit within your strategic plan or objectives? – Does it enhance your market position or play into new markets that you endeavor to enter. Are the probable investments understood and reasonable (IR&D and/or bid costs)?
• Is it real? – Is customer funding identifiable or highly probable? Is there a clear customer champion to keep it sold?
• Can you compete? – Do you have or can you develop the capabilities or can you develop a team with the capabilities to win and perform? Are you reasonably confident that no other competitor has a lock on this opportunity?
• Do you want the business? – Is there sufficient reason to believe that, if successful, this business will meet your business objectives for return on investment, profitability, etc.?

In addition to gathering information, your team may begin early positioning and shaping activities through discussions with the customer, by generating White Papers, or through other means. It is also common for customers to issue a Broad Area Announcement (BAA) or Request for Information (RFI) to solicit early feedback from industry. There is often not a clear trigger for when you will transition from this phase to Phase 2, the Qualification phase. It may be that your company has a periodic pipeline review or an annual process for building the out-year plans, often tracking to the government’s budget cycle.

During or near the end of this phase, you will make your initial Report Card assessment. The report card assessment for this (and subsequent) phases is simply a tool to ensure you make an objective evaluation of your status based on what you should know or have accomplished during this phase.

Once you conclude that you will keep the opportunity in the pipeline for further qualification, this should trigger initiation of a formal Capture Plan, a document that serves as a comprehensive repository of information collected and actions planned associated with this particular opportunity. It evolves over the life of the capture and becomes an increasingly valuable artifact. If you do not already have a template for a comprehensive Capture Plan, an excellent approach would be to build one with 10 sections corresponding to the 10 Report Card elements in this document. While the Capture Plan could be as simple as a single hardcopy notebook, most companies benefit by having an on-line version of the Capture Plan to enable timely updates and broad access by members of the team as well as managers.

The following table summarizes the key activities associated with Phase One.

Report Card Assessment
To help ensure your assessment is as objective as possible, the table below defines assessment guidelines for each of the 10 elements for this phase. For Phase 1, only eight of the ten elements are applicable as you will see below (there is nothing to assess for element 9, Proposal Development or element 10, Program Readiness).

As discussed in the initial article in this series, the timing of the assessment during this or subsequent phases may vary based on the importance or complexity of the opportunity, the amount of time spent in this phase, and other factors. Please refer to this initial article for a broader discussion of assessment timing considerations. At minimum, you will want to conduct a Report Card assessment at the conclusion of this phase. This assessment will serve to guide your decision to conduct further research, move the opportunity to the qualification phase, or drop it from the pipeline.

As stated earlier, you will want to customize these guidelines to fit your company’s process and to fit the specific opportunity. Clearly, some guidelines will not apply. For example, if there is no potential for a public-private partnership (PPP) / Economic Development Opportunity (EDO) as shown in Element 1, then this guideline would be eliminated or ignored and would not affect your self assessment. However, take caution not do dismiss guidelines simply because you have no information or plan in place.

The Report Card assessment calls for scoring each of the applicable elements. Article 1 provides a more detailed discussion of the assessment approach and scoring. This score for each element is a color rating based on a numerical score that you assign as follows:

0 = Not Applicable, Blank (this is the default score for Element 9 and 10 for this phase)
1-59 = Red
60-84 = Yellow
85-95 = Green
96-100 = Blue

In simple terms, review each guideline for each element and make an objective assessment of where you stand. If you feel you are on track or have adequate information, scores should generally be positive. If you have little or no information for an item, this should have a negative influence on the element rating. The scores, if performed objectively based on facts and data available, and not the unfounded optimism or gut feeling of the team, will provide a fairly clear picture of the overall health of your capture and will highlight where the team needs to focus moving forward.

Throughout the Report Card assessment process, and particularly at this early stage, Senior Managers should avoid a ‘kill the messenger’ syndrome. Let the facts speak for themselves and use the date to correct weaknesses so that subsequent assessments will hopefully be more favorable. Ultimately, this is designed to help you improve your win probability by covering all the bases and doing the hard work that is critical to a successful capture. Alternately, you may find that your chances of success are not sufficiently favorable and you should abandon the pursuit – saving money and resources that can be allocated to pursuits with a better chance for success.

As scores are agreed for each element after appropriate discussion across the leadership team, then enter the score on the Report Card sheet (refer to article 1). This becomes a permanent record of your status ‘at that point in time’. As you perform multiple assessments, you will see visual trends (neutral, positive, or negative) that may be useful in prioritizing tasks and assessing the effectiveness of your process.