by Pat Dougherty, VP Strategic Planning & DOD, SSD
 If you are fortunate enough to be a capture manager who is given the time to develop a technical approach, to build a relationship with your customer and to properly prepare for the proposal, you have probably had a very satisfying experience. Pursuing opportunities and having the funding necessary to work with an engineering team to help a customer formulate a solution to his problem do not come along often. The larger the program opportunity, the more satisfying the management job can be. These opportunities are often highlights of your career.
But, there are several downsides of being a capture manager that you need to understand so that you are not surprised. A major difficulty capture managers have is finding qualified staff to conduct engineering analysis and design work. Corporate management generally wants to put the best staff on current programs in order to keep paying customers happy. While this practice doesn’t improve the Pwin for new programs, it is quite common and makes your job of finding qualified people more challenging.
A second hurdle for capture managers is grasping the fact that your pursuit falls into a specific level of priority in the hierarchy of your company. It is important to understand when your opportunity is placed low in priority (and thus gets less funding) and when it is at the top of the list. Your job is to do your best with the resources that correspond to your place on the priority list.
Receiving credit for your success is another hurdle for many capture managers. While you may not mind avoiding attention when you lose a bid, you may find that you get little praise for wins. This is not necessarily a reflection on you but more on time and the large numbers of players that are involved in the win. During the end-game of the pursuit a new team is often brought in to lead the proposal and a program manager is assigned. These two players focus the last stages of the win by getting a team to price the effort and write the proposal. Often, management sees the program manager and proposal manager as being most responsible for the win because they are most visible at the end of the effort and they get credit for bringing in the win! It is often forgotten that the capture manager brought the opportunity to the proposal team on a “platter” and it was theirs to lose.
Please don’t let my portrayal of capture management scare you away. The role of capture manager requires superb communication, technical skills and management expertise. It is a management role that can be satisfying on a daily basis and certainly warrants the effort and training. If you get praise and appreciation from senior management it is frosting on the cake!
Otherwise, take satisfaction in knowing that you played a significant role in meeting the challenging needs of your customer.
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