The Department of Health and Human Services is the latest federal agency to tap the creativity of the marketplace by running a contest to find the best products for their emergency preparedness apps. HHS used a tool that is increasingly being relied upon by agencies to find the best mobile solutions, get the work doneRead… Read more »
Consultants often get the blame for high proposal costs because their fees are an obvious big-ticket item. Many business developers tell me, however, that when they tally up the proposal costs at the end of the proposal effort, it is not the consultants that blow the budget. Surprisingly, it’s the in-house employee costs that takeRead… Read more »
Ruby on Rails has quickly become the default web app development framework among the “hacker” and startup community since first releasing in 2004. Why? Because Rails was designed from the ground-up with programmer productivity in mind. It uses a variant of the Model/View/Controller architecture pattern to organize application programming. In addition to the MVC-based arch,Read… Read more »
We hope to see many GovLoopers at the Excellence in Government Conference taking place at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. next week! With an excellent line-up of speakers and a number of interesting topics to cover, it will be a great opportunity for those across government to gather, discuss and collaborate. In thatRead… Read more »
One type of growth challenge that business developers and owners face stems from not having enough time, personnel, or expertise to prepare and respond to the solicitations that otherwise would be a perfect fit for the company. You may be completely new to hiring consultants. You may be worn thin from all the heavy hoursRead… Read more »
How hard can it be to do federal business development? All you need is to be good with people and a willingness to talk to decision makers, right? If it were so easy, why for years has BD been given a bad name, and why have many companies struggled to hire business developers who produceRead… Read more »
Unless you are incredibly lucky and everyone assigned to the proposal is a great writer, you will need to do some just-in-time training to get everyone on the same page. The same goes for conceptualizing graphics. Here is how you go about quickly getting everyone on board to create a winning proposal. Step 1. AssessRead… Read more »
For the next couple days, I am at the ACPA conference in Louisville, KY. ACPA is an amazing organization that supports the work of thousands of higher education student affairs experts and professionals. One of the benefits of many jobs is attending professional conferences and workshops. These are terrific opportunities to not only expand yourRead… Read more »
With capture, many companies focus on the obvious: what are the company’s internal capabilities and the offering – and what can the company do in response to the customer needs. However, there are multiple other factors to take into account when capturing a contract that are all too often overlooked. There is no one rightRead… Read more »
When my phone rings for proposal consulting work, about 90% of the time the story is the same: we’ve got a Request for Proposal in and we need you to help us immediately. I say – great, would be happy to help you. By the way, have you done any capture? I hear either “yes,”Read… Read more »