Cross-Functional Collaboration and the Wannabe PMP

Whether you’re an employee or a sole proprietor, at some point you’re going to have to play well with others to get things done.

Bredemarket has performed this (fancy phrase: “cross-functional collaboration”), both as part of Bredemarket’s services and outside of it.

• As an employee, I’ve managed SaaS proposal projects and other projects that needed the input of many.
• Within Bredemarket, I’ve managed proposal and other projects of similar complexity.

Even though I’m not formally certified to do this, I do it anyway.

Pre-Bredemarket: I get SaaSy

Long before I started Bredemarket, I was managing products and proposals associated with an on-premise technology solution.

This solution had a long sales cycle (longer than Cloudflare’s, for example) and a long implementation time. After contract signature, it might take a year or more to lock down the requirements, procure the hardware and third-party software, configure the solution, perform a factory acceptance test, deliver the solution to the customer’s premises, perform one or more rounds of on-site testing, and obtain final acceptance.

But my employer wasn’t lacking in revenue during implementation, because it received partial payments as it passed various milestones. Perhaps a small percentage of the total price would be paid upon requirements completion. Another percentage at delivery. Additional percentages at different points in the implementation, with the final large payment upon acceptance.

But then I was the proposal manager for a prospect desiring a SaaS implementation.

• The Request for Proposal (RFP) made it very clear that the prospect would not pay a dime to the successful bidder until AFTER the system was accepted and in productive use. Because that’s how SaaS implementations work.

• This would have a major financial impact on my employer, since it would take a much longer time to recoup the initial costs of the implementation.
• Without going into details…we didn’t, um, “win” the bid.

Several years later, the, um, SITUATION had changed, and my employer was more willing to accept the financial risks associated with SaaS implementations. I was still a proposal manager at the time and was able to work on my employer’s first successful SaaS bids. But that assumption of risk wasn’t the only barrier to success, because I had to work with a lot of different cross-functional collaborators to get those bids out.

• The salespeople who wants to sell the SaaS systems to their prospects.
• The engineers who had to do the heavy lifting to transition our on-premise solution to a SaaS solution.
• The program managers who had to keep an eye on the costs of the implementation to ensure that our employer’s financial risk was minimized.
• The customer support people who had to manage the system after final acceptance, even though much of the system was in a cloud center somewhere instead of at the customer’s site.
• The finance and pricing people who had to adjust to this new way of doing business.
• The legal people who had to develop a brand new contract that encompassed the new reality.
• Finally, the executives who were willing to take the risk to enter the SaaS market and who wanted to succeed without losing money.

I think this is when I made my observation about managers of large proposals. In a large project, the proposal manager is the only one who spends 100% of their time on the project. The salespeople are selling other deals, the engineers are engineering other stuff, and so forth. Therefore, it was up to me to ensure that everything continued to move forward, because while these bids were important to the others, they were critically important to me.

Anyway, these later bids had a much happier ending, the employer successfully entered the SaaS market, and as more customers moved from on-premise to SaaS models, thus evening out my employer’s income stream, the financial risk from SaaS proposals was reduced significantly.

That cross-functional collaboration experience, exercised on these bids and in many other instances over the years, would be put to the test a few years later when I started Bredemarket.

Bredemarket: herding cats

It’s one thing for a company employee to manage a project with a ton of people, none of whom report to you and most of whom outrank you.

It’s another thing when an outside contractor has to manage a project of inside employees.

One of my Bredemarket projects, which happened to be another proposal project, required me to do just that. While the proposal was much simpler than the bids constructed at my former employer, the effort still required a lot of shepherding to get all the pieces put together, obtain all the approvals, and get someone to submit the final proposal since I, as a non-employee, couldn’t do it myself.

Everything worked out, and the employees were great, but there were times when it seemed like I was the only one to keep an eye on all the tasks.

Something that I had never been formally trained to do.

Today’s acronym is PMP

Eventually I (temporarily) stopped working on finger/face projects for Bredemarket because I was employed by a finger/face company. And I found myself managing projects of similar complexity (the 80+ battlecard project, for example).

And that’s when I realized that I was a de facto project manager.

Even though I didn’t have the fancy certification to attest to this.

The Project Management Institute offers several certifications, including:

• A “starter” certification, the Certified Associate in Project Management (CAPM)^® certification.
• The next-level certification, the well-known Project Management Professional (PMP)^® certification.
• Additional certifications, listed here.

I toyed around with the idea of starting the certification progression in 2023, and even though my employer didn’t have the rigorous annual goal-setting processes that larger organizations have, I set a personal goal in one of my employer’s Asana projects to advance to CAPM by the end of 2023.

And then…things happened.

Perhaps at some point I’ll get the official piece of paper that I can flash around, but until then I’ll learn on my own, both by coursework and by…well…actual managing projects.