Is it Cake or Fake: 5 Key Ingredients for a Successful Government Project Startup

By Angela Hamlin

Fun Fact: Did you know that the original boxed cake mix only required the addition of water? By the mid 1950s sales began to flatten, and General Mills hired a marketing expert and a psychologist who surveyed women to understand the trend. The experts discovered that women felt guilty for not contributing more to the making of the cake. Some historians will tell you that the addition of fresh eggs, instead of the dried eggs, was enough to make women want to use the cake mix more but the experts discovered that encouraging the women to ice and decorate the cake is what actually made them feel more involved.  Advertisements that encouraged women to decorate the cakes followed and today, more than 186 million Americans (and not just women) use boxed cake mixes. 

The Takeaway for You?

Your BD Team is the Original Cake Mix – the Essentials

1 – Research your Customer and Stakeholders

During the capture phase of a proposal, the capture manager, SMEs and other business development personnel take the time to:

• Identify customer and stakeholder hot buttons, pain points, requirements, goals and expectations.
• Identify key influencers in the customer’s organization
• Evaluate market and economic factors.
• Develop SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis.
• Conduct solution planning and design iteratively.

However, these capture managers, SMEs and other business development personnel are usually not the team that will be delivering on the contract so this information needs to be passed on to the delivery team – think of them as the eggs since they bring the effort all together – which then needs to drill down to the specifics of the contract. This information is used to address both the cognitive conscious (planned activities and tasks) and cognitive unconscious (critical thinking skills/social and emotional intelligence/strategy). This research, analysis and relationship management is not just the responsibility of the project or program manager but the entire team. This conscious act requires that you understand not just what your customer does and how they do it, but why because sometimes the real solution is not the obvious one, or the one you were told.

Where does the Icing and Decorating come in?

Read the instructions and make sure you have all the ingredients.

2 – READ and Understand your SOW and Winning Proposal from Front to Back

The entire project team needs to understand what the customer asked for and what the vendor promised. Some SOWs are very specific, while others may be a little vague to accommodate innovation and technical solutioning. Ensuring the team understands the customer’s needs and desires and balancing that with the vendor’s capabilities and constraints of technology, as well as the environment, will go a long way to manage expectations and get to the heart of why they chose you. For fun, ask your team members if they have read both the SOW and proposal. I suspect that not many teams will come back with a “yes” from everyone. And if they do, test them.

#3 – Understand your Budget

Not all team members will be privy to the financials of the project, but all should understand the financial ramifications of their piece of the contract. For example, is the contract T&M, fixed priced, CPPFF, etc., or some combination, and which contract type applies to which tasks? These details could impact the solution implemented. All team members, employees and subcontractors, should think and act as the financial owner. Everyone is invested in and committed to achieving the project’s objectives. This is part of the true team building process, which we be in an upcoming blog.

#4 – Be Transparent

We all know this, and everyone will say that they do it but do they really? It’s always better to deliver the good, the bad and the ugly to the customer yourself. Just make sure that you offer a resolution for the bad and ugly.

#5 – Communicate Early and Often – both Oral and Written

Generally speaking, technicians do not like to document. Agile does not mean no documentation, it just means documentation is not the top priority. Documentation does not require pages of verbiage. However, it is critical to document what you did and how you did it for your customer’s understanding and for any other contractor, auditor, etc. that may need to know. A rule of thumb: it is better to supply more information than not enough.

Oral communication, like the phone call or quick chat in Teams or Slack, becomes more commonplace when you have developed that rapport with your stakeholders. A heads up, quick piece of advice, or positive recognition may be appropriate for oral communication. It is the team’s responsibility to determine what form and format of communication works best for each stakeholder.

If you start off with these 5 ingredients, you will significantly impact the performance of your team and the quality of your work products. Afterall, you do not want to end up with a fake cake, but one that is real and can be enjoyed by you, your team, your customer, and their end user.

About Angela Hamlin

Angela is President and CEO of Hamlin Consulting Services, or HCS, a company specialized in providing project management and IT services to federal and state agencies. Angela has over 25 years of hands-on project, program and executive management experience built upon a technical foundation and is recognized across the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and Social Security Administration (SSA) for advanced experience, leadership and program management skill executing IT development and services, as well as project management solutions. She is a certified PMP and CSM as well as a trained Sigma Six Green Belt, with a CMMI Level 4-Development and CMMI Level 3-Services award under her direct leadership. HCS has developed a suite of methodologies, processes, and procedures to boost productivity, reduced waste, and enhance customer and stakeholder satisfaction using a methodology that combines the science of project management with the psychology of project management. Our approach blends traditional program management methods with Lean/Agile techniques to simultaneously deliver the discipline needed to effectively manage cost, scope, and schedule while offering flexibility and scalability for aggressive deployment timelines and changing requirements.

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