How Managers Can Focus on Continuous Improvement

Managers must, on a continual basis, improve their effectiveness in several key areas.  This is true for anyone in the Intelligence Community, but especially for current and future managers and leaders.  You need to continuously learn and refine your approach to leadership.  Unless you are perfect (and who is?), there is always room for improvement.  If you are not a manager yet, but may be in the future, you need to observe what works and what does not work.  Think about the goals that need to be achieved.  Measure the success of current activities towards those goals.  Offer new ideas and collaborate with your management, offering suggestions that can improve outcomes.  Who knows, maybe this sort of engagement can put you on the radar for future management positions.  If you care about these areas and are willing to work to improve them, then perhaps you should be considered for future leadership positions.  Consider these four areas:

• Customer Interaction
• Staff Engagement
• Identifying and pursuing new work
• Ensuring Optimal Mission Execution

We will discuss each of these areas.  The formula is simple: Identify what excellence would look like, measure against current outcomes, and begin identifying steps to take that would increase the likelihood of meeting the objectives of excellence.

Customer Interaction

The first step here is to ensure that you can identify your customers.  This reminds me of the Project Management PMBOK step where you “Identify Stakeholders.”  Find out who they are and what they want.  Get them to identify what excellence looks like to them.  I recall many years ago on a contract performing O&M for site systems.  We would often get these nebulous contract ratings where we thought we had done great work, but the customer ratings did not bear that up.  In an all hands, someone said, “We need to get the customer to tell us what excellence looks like.  Once they do, and we achieve it, they have to give us an excellent rating on award fee.”  It is simple, but effective.  Once we did this, ratings improved immediately.  You can only get this level of insight by engaging your customers.  Make sure that your customers know that you care about what they care about.  Interaction/engagement is critical to be successful here.  Once you determine these things, incorporate them in your mission execution plans.  Ensure that your staff focus on these things.

Staff Engagement

Your staff need to know who you are and that you have a consistent style of management.  Your staff should not have to guess about your mood or your constantly changing goals.  Be consistent as a manager.  Be truthful.  Have the employee’s viewpoint and career goals in mind.

One advantage I have had in my career is I did not go straight to college, get a BS and MS, then step straight into a leadership/management position.  I started at the bottom.  Upon leaving the USAF, my first position was as a B-level Digital Technician.  Once I became a manager, my experience at multiple technical levels in the organization allowed me to relate directly with employees at all levels, technician through principal engineer and line management.  No matter what level they are in the organization, I have been there.  This experience allowed me to provide two things of importance to staff, our business/contract goals and how they were to contribute and personal goals and steps to get to the next level.

In the contractor world, it is often joked that employees have to look at their pay stubs to see who they work for any given week.  Staff rarely get back to the office when they work on contract.  It is important for management to devise a strategy of employment engagement that ensures company loyalty that extends beyond the name in the top left corner of a pay stub.  So what is the answer?  That is for you to determine.  Identify the goal, implement steps to achieve the goal, measure and repeat.  Use your company and department retention statistics to measure effectiveness.

Identifying and Pursuing New Work

All managers in the contracting side of the IC and many on the government side need to understand how this works.  Learn the basic steps, then you can take measured actions to improve each area.  Let’s call this company, Cleared Resources, Inc. or CRI.

Executive Management – The CEO of CRI sets company direction, i.e. “We will be known for cleared software development and cyber execution.  Our focus areas include Agencies X, Y and Z.”

Business Development (BD) – The CRI BD department identifies upcoming opportunities in software and cyber for the targeted agencies.  These are both prime and sub opportunities.  BD will manage the process of vetting the opportunities through various gate reviews attended by company managers and executives.  Key here are Probability of Win or “pWin” anticipated revenue, costs to pursue, etc.  For the larger companies, these figures take on very significant importance.  In addition to developing budgets for pursuing this new work, this information ties directly into revenue projections that are reported up the management chain and end up in Wall Street projections.  The BD team will also be involved in building the teams for upcoming pursuits.

CRI FY18 Revenue Projections

Added to revenue projections for existing program prime and sub work, the above projected figures are added and reported to obtain a picture of future revenue.  The above figures are further broken down by additional factors such as when in FY18 the work is planned to be awarded.

Capture Management – Once the company decides on a program to pursue, it is up to the Capture Manager to build a compelling and winning strategy for the proposal.  Ideally, no stone is left unturned as the company determines what the customer is asking for, what they really want, and in devising a cost-effective way to meet customer needs.

Proposal Manager – The proposal manager takes the strategy from the Capture Manager and manages the process of engaging the team to create a compliant, compelling proposal.  This often thankless job is also known as herding cats.

Each one of the above steps/roles within the organization and pursuit of new work should constantly be reviewed for effectiveness and opportunities for improvement.  Opportunities for improvement are everywhere you look.  Pay close attention to problem areas and turn them into high-performing areas of excellence.

Mission Execution

Understand your mission, identify your mission stakeholders and if different, the individuals who are responsible for rating your team’s or program’s performance.  Simply put, find out what they want, what the contract says you are to provide, and make it happen.  Constantly monitor your results.  Implement and track methods and processes aimed at increasing your ability to consistently achieve mission goals.  IC mission execution is very different from business execution since effectiveness is difficult to ascertain with certainty.  In the business world, you have revenue targets that, if exceeded, equal success.  In mission execution, how do you know for sure that you correctly obtained all or most of the intelligence that was out there?  As with customer engagement, it is important to work with your customers to understand their definition of excellence.

Constant Improvement is Critical

As you can see from this minimal look at some of the areas of management concern, opportunities for improvement abound.  If you look at the Business Development – Capture – Proposal area, most successful IC companies use a modified Shipley process.  The reason it is a modified Shipley process is because someone tweaked it to optimize it for their organization.  It is the responsibility of management to ensure that every area contributing to company compliance and business effectiveness is monitored and adjusted for optimal effectiveness.  Your competition is doing it.  If they are not, then this is how you get ahead.