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Opinion Piece: Achieving Continuity from Proposal to Delivery

Continuity from Proposal to Delivery

For both external and internal service providers, the transition from the early phases of customer engagement through to the delivery team is vital. Many organisations have an approach to achieving transition but in Applio's experience many of them focus soley on the technical handover and miss other aspects.

Take the case of external service providers. As part of the proposal process, a series of win-themes will have been identified and refined to address not just the commercial and rational needs of the key stakeholders but also the emotional and political. These will be rightly perceived as crucial to winning the bid, but once the bid is won what happens to those themes ? Typically they have served their purpose and become lost in the frenzy of staffing and mobilisation. Ask a typical delivery team what the bid win themes were and generally only the project manager (who hopefully was involved in the bid) will be able to broadly remember them. Other team members will probably not even be aware of them.

But think about it....

Weren't they the themes that won you the business in the first place ? At the point of decision making didn't those win themes represent what the customer believed they were buying ?

If that's the case, at the point of delivery and acceptance is that also the emotional acceptance criteria they'll use, irrespective of what's in the acceptance test plan ? How can a delivery team proactively manage expectations and acceptance if they only know the criteria specified in the requirements catalogue ?

The same applies to in-house programmes and projects. How many members of the delivery team truely understand the key aspects of the business case that drew the sponsor to sign it off in the first place ?

Perhaps these types of disconects explain why customers express disappointment in the reality versus the promise of service providers ?

To find out how to bridge the gap and how to make the smoothest types of transition from bidding/definition to mobilisation and delivery, contact us.