You know the feeling- you prioritize and then you reprioritize. Sometimes it’s a conscious and deliberate process and sometimes things come up and you re-prioritize on the fly. During this hectic SBIR proposal season, I thought I’d take the time to talk about priorities and offer some suggestions for how to overcome priority misalignment.
We each have our own priorities and it’s important to remember that your priorities are just that…yours. I’ve written before about how it isn’t common for the priorities of each of the many stakeholders in USG acquisitions to align. For you, customer memorandums, technical volumes, and fundraising may all be tugging at you equally and be your top priorities. Your government counterparts may be dealing with personnel turnover as we enter military move season, urgent mission requirements, or budget input deadlines. Even though your government counterparts want to support you, sometimes your #1 priority may be their #10 priority, and that can be stressful.
So how do you adapt for these types of priority misalignment?
1- Plan, plan, plan.
The sooner you start work on any priority, but especially proposals and deliverables, the better. When working with the USG, everything takes longer than you think it will. The sooner you start outlining work for your proposal, planning cost, or mapping out schedules the better.
2- Frequent communication and follow ups
In my opinion, frequent communication is one of the most undervalued business practices. The need for frequent communication applies both to your internal and external communications. We have a lot of euphemisms in the south, but when I’m dealing with poor communication the phrase “the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” always comes to mind. It is vitally important that your teams stay on the same page. You can accomplish this by frequently communicating status, questions, updates, etc. to your teams and to your government counterparts. Don’t receive an answer or acknowledgment of receipt? Follow up! It’s okay and encouraged to send a friendly reminder. Just make sure you’ve given someone a reasonable amount of time to respond. My rule of thumb is 3-4 days. If I haven’t heard anything by the middle of the 4th day, I usually send a follow up.
3- Don’t be afraid to ask for clarification or help.
If you’re unsure how to appropriately address some sections of a proposal, ask! Sometimes the USG can answer and sometimes they can’t, but it’s always worth it to ask. This saves time and could also prevent you from providing incomplete or non-compliant information.
There are probably a dozen ways you can overcome the stress caused by priority misalignment, but the best way to overcome it is to get as far ahead of your deadlines as possible. If you take nothing else from this post, take this--Not everyone will prioritize your deadlines like you do. Assume everything you’re trying to do will take longer than you expect it to.
We’re all trying to make a positive influence so don’t get discouraged!
Keep moving forward,
