Post-Proposal | After Action Review
Does your company know what happened?
The proposal was finally submitted, the team has finally gotten a night’s rest, (some having nightmares of missed compliance items and some cherishing the eventual win party)! Either way, a lot of mental focus is disbanded after a successful proposal submission. One of the things that many companies benefit from, but fail to do often, is an After Action Review or Lessons Learned review. We recommend doing this often, and quickly, after the proposal is submitted. It doesn’t have to be conducted in a formal manner, with meetings or papers. After action reviews can be a simple non-formal format such as a survey or questionnaire to the key players of the proposal. After action reviews should involve your proposal manager, your key subcontractors, any consultants you may have had, and most importantly your pricing lead. Most companies forget to include lessons learned from a pricing/cost volume preparation perspective. There are many lessons about after action reviews for GovCons to be learned on this front. Here are some basic questions to get you started:
1. Were you able to coordinate and manage your subcontractor pricing and its impacts to your proposal in a timely fashion?
2. Was your C-level team allowed to make last-minute changes (hint: Gold team is NOT meant for changing levers such as fee/teaming ratios/labor rates) that absolutely caused a ripple effect and chaos across multiple volumes?
3. Was there enough emphasis on compliance in the Cost volume?
4. Was there enough time built in for cause and effect from pricing to other volumes?
5. Did you prepare with enough data/intelligence when it comes to deciding on wrap rates/labor rates?
Once the proposal is submitted it’s too late to make changes (unless errors are identified that you must inform the government about, but that’s a topic for another day). What this does is get your proposal team ready to bid smartly and accurately for the next ones. After action reviews are all about sharpening your team, making them more efficient for your next contract Making the same mistakes is a fool’s errand in this business, it’s costly and redundant. Don’t be that team! BOOST can help you to conduct After Action Reviews or even better, get your pricing on the right track the first time. Let’s talk: [email protected]
