Pursue the Right Projects with a Go/No Go Process in Vantagepoint

A formal go/no go process ensures that you are focusing on the right projects and clients according to your firm’s strategic goals and experience. It takes time, effort, and money to pursue a project. Pursuing too many projects can be costly because you spend money and resources on projects that you have a low probability of winning and you are not able to give enough attention to those projects that suit your company best.

Vantagepoint CRM already has all of your project pursuit or opportunity information, so why not use it for your go/no go process as well? By adding this process in Vantagepoint, you can:

• Determine the best use of limited business development resources
• Use marketing money where it can result in the best ROI
• Objectively establish whether you should pursue a project or not rather than going with gut feelings
• Improve employee morale simply because you win more, and happier employees mean more effective employees
• Avoid pursuing and winning projects that could put your firm at risk
• Analyze previous wins and losses alongside your go/no go strategy to improve the process or make better-informed decisions moving forward
• Automatically notify others of go/no go decisions and next steps

You can easily create a go/no go process in Vantagepoint by adding user defined fields to projects and using workflow to support the process. This process can be as simple or complex as you need it to be to align with your business needs. You may have a set of fields to capture intel to inform your go/no go decision, or you can create a more sophisticated system that calculates a score and objectively determines if the opportunity is a go or no go.

In the below example, user defined fields were added to a user defined tab for Go/No Go Analysis and a workflow button is used to calculate a score that determines if the project is a go based on the unique process for this firm.

Let’s have a look at this example in more detail. At the very top of the form, there is a button to run the go/no go process and some fields that are populated by workflow based on the business developer or project manager’s answers to other fields in the form. There is a Go/No Go field that will be populated with Go, Go with Management Approval, or No Go based on the answers. There are also scores for the overall go/no go calculation and subcategories for the client, project and competition score. In workflow, each answer is assigned a weight to calculate the scores and the final go/no go value.

Below the scores, there are some overview fields for when the RFQ or RFP is due, who completed the form, and the date the form was completed. The completed date is automatically populated by workflow when the business developer or project manager clicks the Perform Go/No Go button.

Then, there is a section for each of the subcategories for Client, Project, and Competition Evaluation. These are the fields the user answers to calculate the go/no go value.

To create this form, the administrator added a workflow button to this tab via the screen designer and set up a scheduled workflow that is run when the button is clicked. The scheduled workflow has the following conditions:

• Populating the Completed Date with Today’s Date
• Populating a score in hidden user defined fields for each answer. For example, if the user selects that the client’s relationship type is an existing client then the score for the hidden user defined field for Relationship Type Score is set to 2. If the type is a former client, the score is 1 and if you have no relationship with this client yet, it is 0
• Adding all of the scores in each subcategory to calculate the Client, Project, and Competition Scores
• Adding all of the scores to calculate the overall Go/No Go score.
• Populating the Go/No Go value with Go, Go with Management Approval, or No Go based on the go/no go score
• Notifying others of the go/no go decision

If a go/no go process is a new concept at your company, here are a few things to consider:

• Ensure you are asking the right questions and weight them properly
• Look at your previous wins and losses to examine what made you successful or not
• Think about how you might have foreseen that outcome and what questions you could have asked to make the go/no go decision better from the start
• Get feedback from different people in different roles to ensure you have the right decision criteria  
• Don’t overwhelm business developers or project managers with too many or too complex questions
• Finally, test the go/no go form thoroughly before rolling it out. For example, test the form on previous projects to see if it makes sense.

With a go/no go process built directly into Vantagepoint, you will have visibility into the risks and probability of winning based on your previous experience and business intelligence about this particular project and client. Now that you have narrowed which projects to go for, you can focus on positioning your company to win the pursuit.