The considerations fall into three categories:

 

  1. Top-Level issues
  2. Personnel Issues
  3. Physical Facilities Issues

1 Top-Level Issues:

  • Will this capability be a cost center (that is, funded by a high-level organization, and therefore part of the cost of business development, for example), OR a profit center (that is, funded by the parts of the organization requiring assistance, through back-charges to individual users)?
  • Will there be a single location of this capability (centralized), OR will there be perhaps a single central location, with additional locations closer to the users of the services (de-centralized)?
  • Will the capability include some version of SharePoint, or other text management software, that facilitates version control, and allows easy access from more than a single location?

2 Personnel Issues:

  • Should I use full-time permanent people (FTP), or contractors, to accomplish the work? The answer to this question is always the same: The best answer is ALWAYS a mixture of these two types. Staffing with FTP only means that the staffing level must be high enough to cover the very highest workload, and result is significant downtime for these employees. Along with that comes boredom for the most highly-skilled people, and the encouragement of the others to become accustomed to low activity, and therefore perhaps lazy. Staffing with contractors only means that the organization loses any institutional memory. Inefficiencies and ineffectiveness go with it. The only question is, “What is the best mix, for now that the immediate future?”
  • If you opt to use contractors (see above), will you solicit several sources, well in advance of actual needs, and have in hand several ID/IQ contracts, or Basic Order Agreements (BOAs), to avoid the last-minute rush to get individual consultants on board in time to be effective contributors to a proposal effort?

3 Physical Facilities Issues:

Choosing the right physical facilities is important to functional success. Considerations are:

  • Physical security – Should be easy to isolate from other activities within the customer’s location, to prevent prying eyes from obtaining competitive information.
  • Undesirable location – The less desirable, the better, because if you occupy prime office space, the other parts of the organization will covet this space, and perhaps figure out ways to displace your capability, even in the midst of the creation of an important proposal.
  • Central production facility / secure, separate work areas for specific team(s) – The best complexes I’ve seen feature a central production facility surrounded by proposal-specific team rooms. This allows all teams to use the central facility, without exposing the work there to the other teams; often the other team have teammates who are “partners” on a specific proposal, but serious competitors on other proposals.
  • Copies – The central production facility should have a truly capable and flexible set of copiers, from high speed black-and-white to color, and special-purpose copiers to produce out-size displays.
  • Burn barrels / shredders – Encourage the daily use of these, and discourage the discarding of proprietary materials with trash and garbage. I say that normal trashcans are really the entrance of a very long pipe leading directly to the in-basket of your most serious competitor.
  • Daily sweeps area for all work papers – See above. Nothing good happens to work papers left out overnight, subject to possible theft.
  • Free coffee – It’s a small price to pay for improving morale among the authors. Figure out how much is costs when an author takes 23 minutes to visit the local Starbucks, and the cost of coffee is peanuts.
  • Lunches provided on site – See above also. Lunches, especially during periods of intense activities, allow the members to remain on site, and productive, for the entire business day.

One Last Issue: No single point of failure. Throughout you planning, insist that there be no single point of failure. Having the Government CO correspond with only a single CO on your side, without automatic re-direction of those selected incoming messages, is very dangerous. God forbid, your CO gets hit by a Budweiser truck, you could be at a serious disadvantage until your establish contact again with the Government CO.