Improve using your capital past
Date
January, 2025
Reading time
7 minutes
Category
Best practice
Louis Emmanuel NDJOM BADGA
Louis Emmanuel is a pre-sales consultant working mainly in the IT sector. With over 3 years’ experience in the sector, Louis helps companies of all sizes to adopt innovative technological solutions to optimise their operations and boost their competitiveness.
With a Master’s degree in Business Development and Business Engineering, and a passion for technology and sales, he is able to understand customer needs and propose tailor-made solutions to meet their specific challenges. Louis is also recognised for his communication skills and his ability to work in international and interdepartmental environments.
Key words
#capitalization
#tenders
#response
All tenders and projects are both different and similar. Different in terms of the specific constraints and requirements of customers and the problems or needs they address. On the other hand, these projects are similar in the methodological approach that can be used to address the various issues.
Because they are similar, capitalization is important to draw vital lessons from past responses, and continually improve the methods and processes used to « avoid reinventing the wheel at every tender« , as Gregory W. Pease would have said.
This article focuses on capitalization, its importance in the continuous improvement of responses to requests for proposal (RFP), and the capitalization process itself.
What is capitalization?
According to Pierre de Zutter, 1994, « The capitalization of experience (…) is the passage from experience to shareable knowledge«
As far as I’m concerned, capitalisation consists of adding up past experiences, whether direct or indirect, drawing objective lessons from them and making them accessible in order to improve performance and productivity in future tenders.
Whatever your understanding of capitalization, the key elements to always keep in mind are: experience, which serves as a teaching and reference point; knowledge, which is the gain/lesson from past experience; and sharing, which underlines the importance of making the results of our experiences and lessons accessible, to ensure that the process can be sustained as part of a continuous improvement approach.
Capitalisation is a continuous process consisting of several actions to be carried out and questions to be asked depending on the stage at which you are in the bidding process.
What to do after a response?
It may seem strange to start with what appears to be an end, but there is no capitalization without previous responses, experience or acquired knowledge.
Whether you win or lose, it’s vital to carry out an evaluation once the procedure has ended. After the celebration of victory or the sighs of defeat, it’s time to ask the right questions, and learn lessons that will be useful for future projects and contracts. These questions should enable you to identify:
- What we must continue to do
- What needs to be done better
- What we must start doing
- What we should stop doing
The questions to be asked can be gathered in a file that will serve as a template and be shared. These questions should provide answers and an understanding of:
- Knowledge: Here we’re talking about all the theoretical knowledge acquired throughout the project, that could be reused on other projects or serve as a model or reference for future pre-sales. Beyond what you know, you need to identify what you don’t know. After the answer, make a list of all the theoretical knowledge you missed during the answer, and find out how to make up for it.
- Know-how: Here, list all the practical knowledge you’ve used throughout the response, expertise, team member certifications, individual experiences and reference projects. Also include any elements requested by the client that you may have missed.
- Interpersonal knowledge/skills: It is about questioning qualities and behaviour, but also skills in relation to others. What was done? how did we do it? did everything go well? did we work well together? what could be done better? these are just some of the questions you’ll need to ask yourself.
At the end of each tender, define your capitalization process. Do you carry out an evaluation as a team or individually? Do you have tools and media to use? Do you present your feedback at meetings? How do you collect information from your teams and clients? By answering these questions, you can then take steps to set up a clear and efficient process.
Whatever process you define, it’s important to set achievable goals and to take things one step at a time. Don’t try to climb too big too fast. Instead, take a steady, small-step approach. Over the long term, this approach will enable you to make collective progress faster, by facilitating the involvement of your teams.
What to do before answering?
Before each response, it’s important to define an overall strategy that frames the entire proposal, and therefore the elements that can be used to produce a convincing, winning response.
Capitalization can help you define the global response strategy and make Go/Nogo decisions by providing adequate information.
Use the results of a past capitalization to find answers to certain questions about the client or the project, such as: Is the client well known? What are the client’s previous projects? How did these projects go? Are there similar projects on which we can capitalize? What helped us win or lose a similar one ?
Upstream of a project, you can use the available capitalization elements to define the organization to be set up and the key messages to be put forward. This will give you an overview of the skills, expertise, team and references available in the specific domain, and enable you to ascertain whether you have the skills and expertise required by the client. Here are some examples of questions to ask yourself: Do we have the required skills/expertise ? Do we have the right references ? Do we have the right response team ? What organization can we put in place? What strengths can we bring to the table ?
What to do during a response
Once you’ve identified the client’s needs and defined your response strategy, you’ll need to use the results of past capitalizations to write and format a clear, persuasive response.
The capitalization process is continuous, and the response writing phase is not excluded. During this phase, you may identify practices that may or may not be working. See if the organization can be directly adapted and note them to enrich the capitalization repositories and help them evolve once the response is complete. Each response has its own particularities, so you can learn from them.
How do you effectively capitalise?
Knowing the importance of capitalisation or the reasons behind it is a good starting point, but it is still necessary to properly capitalise. A good capitalization process must be based on a well-defined strategy, supported by the company, department or team implementing it.
Your capitalization strategy must be clear, defining all the stages in the process, and identifying the capitalization tools and methods. It is important to communicate this strategy to the various teams and departments within the company.
All the stages of capitalization, the questions asked, the answers and the lessons learned, are useless if they cannot be shared, accessed and reused. It is therefore important to create and organize a capitalization repository.
This repository is a folder or file containing feedback and results from past capitalization processes. It can be classified by type of client, type of project, or sector of activity, and contain keywords to simplify the search for information. The repository must be accessible to all team members. It’s up to you to define a rule for filling in the repository: either each member adds to it, or you identify a manager who will be responsible for modifying the repository, classifying it and recording feedback.
An effective capitalisation process is based on constant monitoring and updating of the repository and permanent skills transfer, with a focus on continuous improvement of people, processes, methods and tools. The aim of this coordination is to achieve constant innovation, and greater productivity and competitiveness.
Conclusion
Finally, remember that effective capitalisation will enable you to adapt more quickly to market changes and improve your competitiveness and productivity. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel for every tender, and you can maximise the potential of your resources by improving every day. You’ll improve by capitalising on your past.
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