In a highly entrepreneurial environment, partner with other company leaders to design, build, implement, and manage operational structure and processes for Optimetra’s Proposal Practice (“Practice”), including strategy, management and development, and solution planning for competitive client proposals. Build and lead strong and cohesive engagement teams and environments. Drive performance and productivity levels that reflect quality and result in a consistently superior client experience. Manage engagements toward desired financial outcomes for both clients and Optimetra.

We are restricting recruiting to the Colorado Front Range, as the person in this role will need to meet face-to-face with the company management team on a regular basis.

The right person will be entrepreneurial, energetic, a good problem-solver, knowledgeable about the healthcare industry in general and public sector healthcare in particular, and experienced in proposal development and management. That person must also be great at leading others and in mentoring and team building. Finally, managing proposals effectively require being able to shift between the big picture and paying attention to the smallest details. It’s a challenging job, but a rewarding one as well – we like to win.

No phone calls or emails. Instead, if you are interested and qualified, go to this page and fill out the form, indicating your interest:

http://www.optimetra.com/consulting_opps.php

(While the page says “consulting opportunities,” this is a full-time, salaried position with benefits.)

If you are not familiar with what we do, here is a summary:

Founded in 1997, Optimetra^®, Inc. is a nationwide leader in healthcare business development and proposal service solutions. The firm helps clients identify and pursue the best opportunities to deliver innovative healthcare solutions to the public sector. Optimetra has provided business development and proposal consulting and training services to many of the nation’s top physical and behavioral healthcare organizations.

It’s the sort of heads-down, focused approach that turns out lots of stuff. Great productivity! Or is it? What’s the answer to the larger question of the right supporting information for this product? How do we provide the optimal combination of documents, online help file, webinar, training courses, FAQs, and so on, that meet the customer’s need at the right time?

This issue is not confined to technical writing, by the way. It applies to other areas where we practice. Consider the project manager who is obsessed with updating the project schedule, but will not address the fact that the product solution doesn’t really address the customer’s needs. Or, the proposal developer who assembles answers to an RFP (request for proposal) from a database, without considering whether those answers really address the background and specifics of the customer’s question.

I want to go one step further and say that this ability to look at the larger picture, and participate in global problem solving, is key to an individual’s ability to find and keep good positions. We certainly try very hard to find people who are good creative problem solvers, and can participate actively in executing the solutions.

Solve the problem.

Manyyears ago, I worked on a project to move several local health plan functions into a regional service center. The service center was to combine claims processing, enrollment and billing, and member and provider call center services under one roof. The objectives were to:

• standardize process
• standardize information systems
• achieve economies of scale

Standardizing information systems was difficult, but doable – all of the individual systems were converted to the reference system before the health plan’s functions were moved to the regional center. Achieving economies of scale was possible, and done to a great extent – through a shared, standardized facility, shared resource functions (human resources, training, systems support, etc.), and standardization of job types.

Standardization of process – no.

See, each health plan’s functions were “together separately.” Each, as a separate, unified, and integrated subgroup at a local plan, had its own way of going about processes for adjudicating claims, enrolling members, reconciling billing, or answering phone calls. When the function was moved to the regional service center – “all together” – everyone assumed that the process would be that ideal, conceptual process that the service center’s leaders had imagined.

Except that it didn’t happen.

These processes were inextricably driven and supplemented by the knowledge of the people who originally created and operated them; by the connections each process had with other processes that remained at the local health plan; and by the conventions that existed between the health plan and its external stakeholders, including the plan’s members and providers, state regulators, community agencies and advocates. Picking up the process and moving it does not automatically preserve those things. It instead destroys knowledge (the people did not move); breaks connections (the local plan employee had the relationship, the regional employee does not); and forgets conventions (the regional center has no idea what the norms really were).

So, the regional center scrambled – to recover from the ensuing chaos.

I am not against centralizing a function. It is possible to preserve the useful parts of the knowledge and relationships; while pruning those things that are not benefiting anyone in the system. Doing so is critical to realizing the objectives; as in those set out for the regional service center. None of it is easy,  because it concerns the soft parts of the process – things that do not appear in a flowchart or procedure. It’s about knowing whether a particular decision maker prefers email or a phone call; or whether, contrary to contract, there is an informal agreement that a report to a regulator will be formatted in a particular way.

Returning to the original issue – the consolidation of proposal centers into a single unit – similar problems will arise. Such a center will serve multiple lines of business with differing stakeholder expectations, different problems to solve, and existing threads of relationships with subject matter experts that need to be understood and preserved, changed, or discarded as best suits the vision.

Centralizing, then, means understanding all of the elements that cause the functions to be productive.

We’ve seen a variety of organizational attitudes and responses to this:

• Apathy
• Too Little, Too Late
• Meaningful Effort

Getting a contract in a competitive procurement depends on many factors, including the quality of the technical solution presented in the proposal; the organization’s past experience with its customer and perceived ability to serve the customer’s future needs; and pricing. Organizations in the first bucket, “Apathy,” roll the dice when they submit their proposal – they submit the proposal and hope for the best. Those in the second bucket, “Too Little-Too Late,” either make a show of preparation to understand and maximize the opportunity, or do it in earnest, but in all the wrong ways. Organizations in the third bucket, “Meaningful Effort,” are prepared. While they might not always win, they have a systematic way to examine opportunities, analyze the factors that will influence the customer’s decision, and try to position themselves in the best way to maximize the probability of winning.

Some typical examples of behaviors we have seen:

• Apathy – “We have lots of operational problems, and have a constantly declining client base for the contract. But we can’t do anything about it because we don’t have the tools, knowledge, and resources to fix the problems. So, we’ll just rely on submitting the best proposal we can – maybe the proposal can make us look great!”
• Apathy – “We’re doing OK, but we have some problems to resolve with our customer, and there are lots of hungry competitors. We’re doing all we can to just operate the contract right not, and can’t be bothered to spend any time working on the next-generation technical solution with the proposal group. Hope they turn in a great proposal!”
• Too Little, Too Late – “This is our critical contract, and so we’re going to work to make sure we retain it. We’re expecting the RFP in one month, so we need to clean up all of the operational problems we have within 30 days. We’ll have the clerical staff [no proposal expertise] write the proposal so our operations staff isn’t distracted.”
• Meaningful Effort – “We’re expecting the RFP in 12 to 18 months. Ninety-seven percent of our performance indicators are within compliance. We have one area that is problematic that we have a task force working on, and they are meeting regularly with the customer to reach a satisfactory resolution. Based on discussions with legislators and agency, as well as community activity, we are expecting changes in four areas of the contract, and each has a project team working to develop a technical solution and communicate with the appropriate stakeholders. Our proposal group is engaged with the task force and project teams so that they know about the solutions.”

Which organization are you? Are you ready to retain your critical contract?

I do this for two reasons. First, I find out whether this person has a specific strength that will be useful to us and our clients. Second – and more important – I determine whether the person has done the necessary internal work – looking introspectively at who they really are and who they want to be.

Hiring managers instead often ask about strengths and weaknesses. This is nearly useless, in my experience. “I can use Microsoft Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint, and I can write, and I am good in meetings, and…and…and.” Sure. You and fifty others.

Unfortunately, companies fall victim to the same trap. “What are you good at?” “Well, our care management program has components X, Y, and Z, and we pay claims timely, and we …” That’s great – have you done an analysis against your competitors for each of those dimensions? Why are you different?

Or, the company trots out the mission statement:

We are the market leader in providing advanced health care service administration to our state, federal, and commercial clients.

So are a hundred others.

Why is this important? When you are competing for business in a highly competitive space, you should (a) clearly know the thing that your company does that is well past the competition’s capability; (b) know why that is specifically important to the customer to whom you are selling.

In developing proposals, we create and use win themes to show the customer why your advanced capabilities will benefit that customer, and thus should cause the customer to select you over other bidders.

Win themes need to be few, focused, and compelling. They are the result of introspection (and competitive analysis). Instead of having 12, 15, or 25 “reasons” why you are better than the competition, have three that are so stark, obvious, persuasive, and meaningful that the customer cannot help but notice. Use those themes everywhere in your proposal.

So – what does your company do better than anyone in your sector?