Build Your Team
Assembling a team can be a delicate and frustrating process. You need to balance recruiting organizations that seem best suited to fulfill the required criteria with those you can trust to be good partners. It is often hard to anticipate in advance who among the team will be collegial and conscientious versus those who may be mercurial. A few qualities to consider when recruiting partners:
Can they demonstrate the qualifications? “Show, don’t tell” is more than guidance for writing and argumentation. When you present your team as uniquely qualified for a project, how will you illustrate the expertise of each member? Do they have experience with relevant projects of similar scale? If not, how will you demonstrate their capability?
Are their qualifications appropriate? Relevant experience is not a yes/no binary, but one of degrees of “how” and “enough.” Underqualified partners may jeopardize performance, but overqualified partners can push the budget out of reach or may not produce their best work because other commitments are more engaging.
Do they have personnel to lead their division of the work? Subject matter expertise does not ensure project management acumen. Who will be responsible for their portion of the budget, ensuring deliverables, and communicating with the rest of the team? If they and/or their organization is not suitably qualified or willing to manage their portion of the project, who at your organization will assume responsibility?
Are they overcommitting or under-committing? While conventional wisdom asserts that “if you need something done, give it to the busiest person you know,” that is risky advice in assembling a team. You need to ensure commitments are made because of interest in the work, and not a sense of obligation or without consideration of how the project timeline fits their schedule. Developing an FOA can place massive demands on schedules, and a partner unable to attend meetings or make deadlines is a risk to all other members. Likewise, a partner who is not particularly compelled by the work but that commits simply for the prospect of a future paycheck often does not produce work of the highest caliber.
Do they have experience with FOA responses? Responding to a federal funding opportunity is intense, requires attention to detail, and demands mental and operational agility. For partners with FOA experience, it is useful to hold a “lessons learned” before launching the response, to share experiences and establish expectations. Likewise, partners without experience require an orientation to the process and setting expectations for how the project will work, how it will adjust to evolving needs, what is expected of communication and collaboration, and how to raise issues.
Do they have experience working with agencies or receiving federal funding? Executing a project under the supervision of a federal agency carries many obligations that may be unfamiliar to organizations new to federal contracts. Accounting, reporting, and other project management requirements may be much more detailed than a partner is accustomed to, and providing that knowledge up front can ensure they are willing to perform the duties of the work as well as reap the benefits of it.
