Managing Capture and Solutioning In Pipeline

Overview

Capture planning and solutioning are vital in government contracting to align your strengths with agency needs. Capture clarifies requirements, analyzes competition, builds relationships, and ensures proposal readiness. Solutioning tailors innovative, compliant approaches to address agency challenges and demonstrate your ability to deliver results.

GovDash makes recording this data quick and easy with the added benefit of using this crucial information when creating a response within the Proposal Cloud. Learn how your team can utilize the Pipeline to strengthen your capture and solutioning processes using GovDash.

Capture and Solution Questions

GovDash provides pre-set questions to help your team hone in on key details to help you determine differentiators, customer needs, risks, budgets, and more.

These questions are segmented into phases:

• Analysis includes questions relating to the customer's budget, critical companies, and changes to the scope of work.

• Intel provides questions designed to gather crucial information necessary for understanding the client's environment and needs. It ensures that all relevant details are captured to create a comprehensive view that informs strategy and decision-making throughout the proposal process. Themes include:

  • Stakeholders

  • Motivation

  • Requirements

  • Assessments

• Solution questions are used to detail the proposed approach and its associated features, benefits, and risks. This tab helps in articulating how the solution meets the client's requirements and offers a clear, compelling case for why your team is the best choice for the project. Themes include:

  • Approach

  • Features

  • Benefits

  • Risks

Need some help?

Our Capture/Solutioning template contains examples that you can review to see what each question is looking to achieve. You can download it at the link below!

GovDash Proposal Success Document_Capture-Solutioning

32.77 KB

All information recorded within these questions will be automatically transitioned to the solicitation response when moving an opportunity from your Pipeline to the Proposal Cloud. You

Creating Proposal Responses from Pipeline Opportunities

To learn more about transitioning your opportunities to the Proposal Cloud to generate a proposal response, check out our guide here.

Suggested Answers

Within each individual question, GovDash provides a Suggest Answer button that will help you and your team develop an answer to a question. If GovDash doesn’t have enough information to suggest an answer for you, it will ask you for additional details as it works to develop an answer to the question.

You can provide GovDash with more context (whether that be meeting notes, customer intel, etc.) via Upload File on each question, which it will use to develop an answer. GovDash will also utilize any documents you have uploaded to the opportunity’s Documents tab for these questions as well.

Capture Plan Templates and Custom Questions

The GovDash Pipeline supports adding custom capture and solution plan templates and questions to tailor GovDash around your existing processes.

To add custom capture/solution questions that you can use within your opportunities, click the Settings gear in the top right of the Pipeline, or navigate to Settings > Capture Cloud.

Creating and Managing Capture Plan Templates

Under Capture Plan Templates, your Default Template houses the GovDash pre-set capture/solution questions. You may add, edit, or remove questions under this template, or you can create a brand new template using the Add Template button.

What happened to my existing custom questions?

Your existing custom questions are mapped to the Default Template, along with the pre-set GovDash questions.

When managing your templates, subcategories and questions can be created under each phase. A subcategory houses your questions, and you can create as many of each as needed.

Creating Questions

To create custom questions under a subcategory, click + Add Question under your desired capture phase and subcategory. Next, provide the question, purpose, goal, and desired impact of the answer to that question in the subsequent fields. These are important pieces to include as this helps GovDash understand the context of your question when used in context to Suggested Answers or within proposal content.

You may optionally toggle if the question will be used when GovDash generates proposal content. This is especially useful if you want to record your notes within these questions, but not necessarily inform GovDash when it’s creating content, keeping the information siloed to the question itself.

Once created, your question will be listed under the capture phase and subcategory that you assigned the question to, as shown below.

To make changes to any of your questions, navigate back to Settings > Capture Cloud, click on your capture plan, phase, subcategory, and then question, and make your changes. You may also delete any question you’d like by clicking the trash can icon on the question, including the default GovDash included questions.

Using Capture Plan Templates

To use the Capture Plan Templates within your opportunity, simply select the Capture Plan Template drop down on the right of your opportunity page and choose your desired template.

This will replace the questions within the Capture Plan with your template. If you swap to a different template accidentally after answering questions, the answers will not be lost, you can swap back to the other template without losing information.

Real Time Collaboration

Within each capture/solution question, you can collaborate in real time with your team members. As team members type within each question, you’ll be able to see who is contributing and where at the top of each box.

Their contributions will update in real time, making the process of running capture in GovDash seamless.

Tracking Capture/Solution Progress

Throughout the capture and solutioning processes, you can track your team's progress on an opportunity using the Capture Progress progress tracker on the Overview tab, as well as the percentage scores on each individual tab, as seen below.

Assigning Roles

Using your GovDash team list, you can assign specific people to an opportunity via the Members list on the main Overview tab. Here you can assign project, capture, and proposal managers, as well as subscribers.

Within Settings, you can configure your notification preferences for daily email updates on changes to opportunities that you’re assigned to, which is controlled by the Daily Edited Opportunity Digest.

Can I add custom roles?

At this time the assignable roles are limited to Project, Capture, and Proposal Managers.

Related Opportunities

Using the Related opportunities section within an opportunity record, you can relate multiple opportunities together to make joint pursuits easier to track. Opportunities that are related will not share information/details between them, but it makes it easier to visually see a relationship and quickly navigate between multiple related opportunities.

To relate an opportunity to another, simply select the + button within the Related opportunities window to the right of the opportunity Overview page.

Once related, the opportunity will be shown within the list and act as a shortcut that can be clicked to quickly bring you to the related opportunity.

In practice, if two opportunities share high similarity across these four dimensions, they are highly relevant to each other. That means lessons learned, past performance, capture approaches, and even solution elements from one can inform or strengthen the other.