April 2023- Opportunity Evaluation

Pipeline inflation is a common issue seen in many company Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Adding too many opportunities creates an unrealistic pipeline and results in distorted business metrics due to over-saturation. Establishing a manageable, accurate pipeline requires strategic opportunity evaluations. These assessments, refining the pipeline through bid/no-bid decision-making, ensure resource optimization and metric accuracy.

Proper opportunity evaluations consider two things:

1)     Addressability: Verifying an opportunity's bid eligibility, considering factors such as size standard limitations, socio-economic categories, and NAICS designation. Beyond these, a detailed analysis of factors like acquisition policies is essential. For instance, the 2020 Department of Defense's Class Deviation—Justification and Approval Threshold for 8(a) Contracts adjustment significantly impacted sub-$100M contracts' risk profiles, necessitating reassessment of addressability and the potential shift from full and open to 8(a) opportunities.

2)     Organizational Fit: assess if an opportunity aligns with a company's competencies, past performance, and strategy goals before bidding.

• Competency Match: Assess if your company currently performs similar work and has resources for successful execution if awarded the contract. This involves analyzing the incumbent or draft Statement of Work (SOW) and consulting with Program Management or Operations.

• Past Performance Match: Ascertaining if the company has successfully executed similar work previously, as per Sections L and M of the solicitation. The necessity and risks of teaming should also be considered.

• Strategy Match: Determine if the opportunity aligns with the company's strategic plan, including resource guidelines and market positioning strategies. Only opportunities that adhere to resource guidance and boost market positioning should be included in the pipeline.