Every year, COLSA selects employees from major categories across the company to highlight as part of our commitment to recognizing and rewarding good work. Rewarding efforts that go above and beyond in support of the customer is how COLSA promotes one of the company’s core values:
“People are our most valuable resource.”
Because of the work of dedicated employees like Tammy DeWeese, COLSA’s focus can remain on offering quality products and services that meet or exceed customer requirements and ensure customer satisfaction.
The Importance of a Good Proposal Manager
Tammy DeWeese was recently promoted to Proposal Manager. Key to the success of any proposal effort, the proposal manager must work with COLSA employees across corporate departments like Contracts, Pricing, BD/Growth, Security, and IT and support collaboration with COLSA Subject Matter Expert (SME) contributors/writers and external industry teaming partners under strict incremental deadlines to deliver the final product.
COLSA’s Proposals Department handles proposals by linking them to a Vice President, who selects a qualified individual (such as Tammy) to be that proposal’s Manager, who interfaces with the assigned Lead Proposal Analyst to get the job done. The proposal manager leads the planning, coordination, and development tasks required to deliver a compliant and compelling proposal. Proposal managers work with Senior Leadership to analyze the proposal requirements and coordinate the performance of tasks to pull together content or deliverables for the final proposal submission.
Hearing from Her Nominator, Tom Newman, Director of Proposals
“Tammy has excelled in the performance of multiple duties in support of proposal development and delivery, assistance in capture activities, and in developing processes and supporting documents for Growth Team initiatives. Tammy’s contributions span a broad range of actions due to her acknowledged expertise in COLSA capture and proposal processes, her willingness to support her colleagues, and her demonstrated ability to produce high-quality results.”
Tammy DeWeese sees the most important part of her job, whether functioning as a Lead Analyst or as a Proposal Manager, as “asking the leading questions” to get the team’s approach to a proposal aligned. These questions set up the initial kickoff meeting with all members of a proposal’s team (the Capture Manager, the Vice President overseeing the proposal and any other interested executives, the Subject Matter Experts who have been tapped to write and answer questions, the other members of the Proposal Department, and the Pricing Department). These questions may also invite research, whether into COLSA’s own file archive or on various tools or other companies—research which Tammy is eager to help with.
“I started at COLSA as an entry level Proposal Analyst 12 years ago … I feel like I ask even more questions than I did before,” Tammy says of her new role.
Recognizing Tammy’s Work Over the Years
This occasion led to an interesting reflection on the nature of the job. “Proposals have a meaningful, real impact on the company,” Tammy said. She then mentioned that one of her first proposal efforts was the OASIS GWAC. Now, more than 10 years later, her latest proposal as the Lead Analyst was OASIS+, the recompete of OASIS, on which she successfully led a team of Proposal Analysts to COLSA wins in all proposed domains, as well as wins in all proposed domains on a simultaneous effort with COLSA’s JV, DCREVTECH (a Mentor-Protégé JV formed by Diaconia LLC and COLSA).
Over the years of COLSA’s performance on the original OASIS, COLSA has won many Task Orders which have grown the company, expanded COLSA’s capabilities, and have led to the hiring of many talented individuals. “It was really gratifying [to work on OASIS] again.”
It was so gratifying, in fact, that when Tammy DeWeese was invited to the end-of-year COLSA Program Managers’ Christmas Party, she thought it would just be for a discussion of the recent OASIS+ win. Instead, to her surprise, she was one of the four names called to receive an award herself.
“I was very pleasantly surprised and overwhelmed,” she said, noting that in the Proposals Department, Proposal Analysts meet so many talented people while working on proposals across COLSA and see firsthand the extent of the exceptional support provided to our customers, so to be selected over all of them was quite the surprise!
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