SOLUTIONEERING BOOKS
Solution Engineering
Winning Proposals Are Engineered, Not Just Written
Paperback: 211 pages
Publisher: Opus Book Publishing (2020)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9898127-2-6
Do you feel uncertainty or frustration when submitting a proposal to the government? Are you challenged to make a bid decision with less than adequate information? Many of us wonder, “Did we do enough?” The goal of this book is to illustrate how winning proposals are engineered and not just written.
Whenever you engineer something, critical thinking must occur first. Trades happen when you must design a solution within money, resource, and time constraints. This is particularly true when attempting to win business from the government.
This book teaches the Solution Engineering Framework. Application of a framework to support design of a winning proposal enables better decision-making and increased probability of winning. It creates an approach centered on “thinking before writing.” What makes this book unique? It teaches a simple, yet powerful, deliberate, engineering-based approach to designing proposal solutions. It also helps develop the supporting narratives. It explains how to avoid common pitfalls. It offers an engineered approach that demystifies the process of winning government proposals.
This book provides a capability that complements any existing business development process. Applying what the book teaches will increase the value of your company. It helps store the rich context of how and why a deal was bid. Learn how to stop playing the game of government proposals, squeeze uncertainty out of your bids, and beat the odds and win!
Missing Measurements of Competitive Procurements
How Well is Your Company Doing Today to Win the Business of Tomorrow?
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Opus Book Publishing (2025)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9898127-9-5
This book is about how performance measurements provide insights into the goodness of competitive procurement bidding efforts. Such measurements aid in identifying issues early (before they become problems) and taking corrective actions to improve performance to increase the probability of winning. The book explains how to apply a generalized measurement methodology known as Object Measurement (OM™) to create performance measurements that are leading (versus lagging) indicators to improve bidding performance.
This book is also about how to design and apply performance measurements within the context of a strategic analysis framework (the Solution Engineering Framework™) for engineering winning proposal solutions. This framework helps business development teams build an inventory of strategies and strengths that are then allocated against potential customer’s requirements and evaluation criteria to score maximum points.
This book is written from multiple professional practitioners’ viewpoints: business developers, capture managers, program managers, technical leaders, pricing managers, proposal managers, and corporate executives—all of whom do the necessary strategic thinking to win federal, state and local, and commercial bids.
Performance Measurement of Competitive Procurements
Leadership manages an individual’s, team’s, and organization’s competitive performance by holding people accountable for their work performance and work accomplishments. Performance measurement provides your company’s leaders with timely information so they can take proactive corrective actions before issues become problems.
Performance measurement also provides insights into the question: “How well is your company doing today to win the business of tomorrow?”
Performance Measurement Indicators help decrease business risk throughout the competitive procurement lifecycle while increasing the probability of winning competitive procurements.
An Insider’s Guide to Capture Management
An Illustrated Overview
Paperback: 140 pages
Publisher: Opus Book Publishing (2023)
ISBN-13: 978-0-9898127-6-4
The mission of government is too important and its challenges too complex to treat winning competitive government bids as merely a transactional activity. Critical thinking is required to create innovative, winning solutions.
Peter Lierni, the author of the ground-breaking Solution Engineering book, which was released in 2020, has now published a more light-hearted look at the world of capture management in An Insider’s Guide to Capture Management. This captivating quick-read proffers 66 questions about the challenges of consistently producing innovative and winning proposals. His answers (along with accompanying illustrations from the gifted Eric Bakey) are both entertaining and profoundly and provocatively informative. The author leads the reader step-by-step through the critical thinking necessary to win in the increasingly competitive government market space and the rationale for building a framework within your organization to encourage and capture that type of thinking.
Whether you are a professional business development professional, a capture management specialist, a proposal manager, or a Subject Matter Expert, you will appreciate the author’s perspective on what it takes to be successful in your ever-changing world. You will no doubt come away committed to the core principle of “thinking before writing.”