I read a great book a few months ago called “Lean in” by Sheryl Sandburg, the COO of Facebook. The principle of the book was to provide a successful woman’s perspective on executive business. I recommend the book for lots of reasons.
One of the great nuggets of wisdom I got from it was about prioritization. Sheryl used one key question as a litmus test for prioritizing all the different things a leader must do:
What will happen in the next 6 months if I don’t do this?
I read the book over a year ago and I find myself using that same litmus test often. I use this question to clarify business priorities like building and executing a podcast each week, ensuring we are staying engaged with our customers, and to ensure I write a blog at least once a quarter. I also use it for how I prioritize my time with my family, how often I exercise, and how often I get up from my desk and stretch and clear my head…despite the passion to work constantly on serving and investing in those around me.
It turns out that this is a great axiom for contract management as well. When I pose this “what will happen in 6 months…” concept to the Skyway team, they all have stories of contractors and offerors calling us too late for assistance, or at least much later than when a problem was still manageable. This applies to pre-award and post award prioritization. The “6-month question” can be a critically liberating tool to prioritize the efforts of a leader, a team, or an entire organization.
Here is an examples to prove my point:
What will happen in 6 months if Shelley stops posting a blog each week? You’re answer to that should show just how effective this is.
SIDE NOTE: If you don’t know what’s going to happen when you do, or do not, do specific things as a contractor, post a question in the forum and we’ll explain it.
Here’s the downside: the government team is NOT thinking the same way. When I was a CO, most of my acquisition schedules were self-induced – or at least greatly influenced by my government customer. In other words, I (and the acquisition team) had control over what was going to happen in six months…or at least we assumed we did. That’s why I had RFPs that dragged for 6 weeks, or 6 months, because most of the time nothing happened if we delayed. We just pushed the calendar date to the right and reset any specifics as needed. Unless we had hard stops like colors of money (see CO Podcast Episode 019) or funding reallocation (which is usually loosely attached to colors of money anyway), there was no risk of us pushing the date to the right.
Bottom line: If you knew what is going to happen in 6 months if you don’t do something, you would do it, right? If you knew that you could just delay it six more months, what would you do then?
For this and many other reasons, the government market, once again, isn’t a “little bit different”. It’s a lot different.