Go-NoGo Review & Plato's Allegory of the Cave

A Go-NoGo review's primary objective is to obtain management's decision on whether or not to engage the company in a bid response.

Considering the internal effort required to deliver a high-quality response, which involves intense mobilization over a limited time by a team composed of management, a bid manager, pre-sales/delivery consultants, account managers, and possibly partners, the decision to proceed with a Go-NoGo review is an investment decision based on an analysis of:

• Commercial Risk Estimating the likelihood of winning a contract based on a deep understanding of the client, competition analysis, and the ability to generate differentiating elements that have real value recognized by the client.

  
  

• Investment Budget The forecasted burden of internal (and possibly external) resources that will be mobilized during the pre-sales period and the investments needed to deliver the project, such as recruitment, tools, etc.

  
  

• Booking & Revenue Beyond estimating the value of the order, an analysis of annual revenues must be taken into account, especially in the case of multi-year contracts like managed service agreements.

  
  

• Profitability

  The ability to estimate a theoretical profitability rate based on:

  • Knowledge of the purchasing conditions applied by the client,

  • The pricing strategy used by direct competitors,

  • The ability to generate value recognized by the client.

    
    

• Return on Investment (ROI) An ROI analysis, especially on managed service contracts, which typically includes a knowledge transfer phase and reversibility that is not always invoiced to the client, along with commitments to a productivity rate.

  
  

• Other Risks Beyond the commercial risk of not winning the contract, responding to a bid exposes the company to various risks, such as:

  • Delivery: Inability to deliver the entire project, the impact of demobilizing resources embedded in the project to reallocate them to the bid response team, etc.

  • Financial: Penalties, invoicing delays due to delivery difficulties, collection issues, etc.

  • Legal: Nature of commitments concerning direct and/or indirect damages.

    
    

In his allegory of the cave, Plato considers that a man who does not have access to real knowledge (the light) is like someone trapped in a world they believe to be the real world.

The idea of associating Plato's allegory of the cave with Go-NoGo reviews comes from the observation that many "GO" decisions within IT service companies (ESNs) are made without thoroughly qualifying the opportunity across the different dimensions of the bid: commercial, technical, financial, and legal. Such decisions are often driven by a low volume of identified opportunities within the sales teams.

Beyond the high risk of losing the investment made in the bid response, the lack of qualification can indirectly lead to:

• Degradation of the client relationship due to a response that does not meet minimum quality standards,

• Demobilization of the employees involved in the bid response team,

• Loss of trust in management.

  
  

In conclusion, the key to making a sound decision to invest or not in a Go-NoGo review mainly lies in the quality of the qualification work performed beforehand by the commercial and technical teams.

Plato: "If we ask people the right questions, they discover the truth about everything by themselves."