Keep your ducks in a row

Financial firms are famous for their disclaimers that read something like the following: 

"Past performance is not indicative of future results and there can be no assurance that the future performance of any specific investment, investment strategy, or product will be profitable, equal any corresponding indicated historical performance level(s), be suitable for your portfolio or individual situation, or prove successful." 

It's almost like they're telling you to ignore past performance or, at the very least, don't count on it as an element of your investing strategy.

On the contrary, Federal Government actions suggest they believe past performance *IS* indicative of future results and that negative past performance assures the likelihood of the Government needing to spend extra effort managing the project. 

This is why almost all Federal RFPs require citing relevant past performance.  The "ask" can be varied, depending on the customer and the requirements at hand.   Sometimes they ask for 3 citations and place a maximum on the number of citations (like 5, for example).  They might establish page restrictions (like two pages per write-up) and provide very specific elements to address in justifying why each citation is relevant.   Ultimately, it's up to the customer to determine relevancy, but every submission needs to make their assessment easy! 

Depending on the solicitation, they may place other restrictions on recency (must be at last 6 months old) or age (no more than 3 or 5 years old).  Additionally, the customer may set dollar value thresholds for whether a project can be considered like scope and complexity (e.g., must be at least $100M in total contract value).  All these factors can sometimes be influenced (before RFP release) and should be, to the extent you can, in the name of enhancing "increasing competition" (i.e., also helping you).  

Beyond your submitted past performance citations, Federal customers have the right to consider any past performance they wish.  This is often accomplished through assessing a bidder's past performance using the official web site for Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) located at https://cpars.gov.  This is possible because under Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Government agencies are required to make detailed and complete statements about a contractor's performance related to:

• Technical
• Cost Control (for contracts that are not firm-fixed price)
• Schedule/timeliness
• Management of business relations
• Small business subcontracting
• Regulatory compliance

Without going into more details, suffice it to say that the Government has an easy way to validate your annual past performance ratings for all your Federal contracts.  In submitting your past performance citations, pick ones with strong CPARS ratings!

If you have weaknesses in your past performance, consider teaming!  (see our other blog "Go Team").  For example, you're planning on proposing a rapid ramp-up of personnel from the start of the project to 1200 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) positions.  Yet you have never hired that many people and have no "demonstrated" past performance doing it.  That could be assessed as a project risk by the client.  By teaming you can bring on a staffing firm with strong past performance hiring in excess of 1200 people for a single project.  Perhaps one of their past performance citations would be relevant to your project's staffing approach and fill a noticeable void. 

SOAP BOX:  Regardless of the planned citations, it is imperative that all your Federal Government projects perform well and get strong positive CPARS report.  It's equally important to quickly deal with negative performance reports as quickly as possible.  Negative CPARS, whether they are related to the past performance citations you submit (or not) can most definitely impact a prospect's decision to award you a contract (or not).   

Accordingly, "keeping your ducks in a row" means two different things in this post.  Not only must you select strong past performance projects when bidding new contracts, corporate personnel must actively manage the CPARS process (in close coordination with their clients) to ensure the best possible ratings and quickly deal with less than positive ratings.

Winners submit strong past performance citations and manage CPARS reports, because federal clients take them both very seriously.

SRS Edge can help assess your past performance, identify weaknesses, and help you fill the gaps to increase your P-win.