Customer Experience (CX) Engineering in Aerospace and Defense:: Delivering Winning Value Propositions in a ‘New-Game’ Landscape

By Dr. Lynn Phillips, Mel Hughes and Dr. Stanton Sloane

The authors contend that new business capture teams operating in the aerospace-defense sector which adopt their “Best Practices, Outside-In, Customer-Centric” approach to executing their capture processes can attain supranormal contract win rates—as high as 80% and higher.

They back up this claim with captivatingly told case study vignettes of 21st century competitions that they were personally involved with, providing teams with practical step-by-step guidelines, tools and templates to help replicate these successes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Mar 26, 2024
• ISBN: 9781665754880

Dr. Lynn Phillips

Dr. Lynn W. Phillips is an Expert on Customer Experience (CX) Engineering and Customer-Centric Strategy in Berkeley Research Group’s (BRG) Digital Transformation Advisory Practice, and a former award-winning teacher and scholar while serving as a faculty member at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he first met BRG’s Executive Chairman and co-founder Dr. David J. Teece. Lynn also held faculty positions at Harvard, Northwestern, Rice, and at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In 2022 Lynn was named by Stanford’s Class of ’85 as one of three professors that had the most impact on people’s careers, looking through the lens of 35 years after graduating GSB. Lynn is a Northwestern PhD graduate of its Kellogg School of Management with over 35 years of experience in executive education and consulting as the founder of his firm Reinventures and now as part of BRG.

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Copyright © 2024 Dr. Lynn Phillips, Mel Hughes, Dr. Stanton Sloane.

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ISBN: 978-1-6657-5490-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5489-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6657-5488-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023924657

Archway Publishing rev. date:   03/25/2024

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Contents

About the Authors

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Footnotes

Chapter 4   Appendix

Chapter 6   Appendix

About the Authors

Dr. Lynn W. Phillips is an Expert on Customer Experience (CX) Engineering and Customer-Centric Strategy in Berkeley Research Group’s (BRG) Digital Transformation Advisory Practice, and a former award-winning teacher and scholar while serving as a faculty member at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), where he first met BRG’s Executive Chairman and co-founder Dr. David J. Teece. Lynn also held faculty positions at Harvard, Northwestern, Rice, and at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. In 2022 Lynn was named by Stanford’s Class of ’85 as one of three professors that had the most impact on people’s careers, looking through the lens of 35 years after graduating GSB. Lynn is a Northwestern PhD graduate of its Kellogg School of Management with over 35 years of experience in executive education and consulting as the founder of his firm Reinventures and now as part of BRG.

Lynn is widely acknowledged as co-creator of many core Customer Experience Engineering concepts now used by business teams globally to choose winning Customer Value Propositions (CVPs), then architect and execute the Value Delivery Systems (VDSs) to profitably provide and communicate that CVP lineup—based upon Day-in-the-Life-of-Customer insights that far transcend what customers can imagine. He has supported over 150 aerospace-defense new business capture teams pursuing and delivering programs for customers across the US Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and other federal agencies. He brings an in-depth grasp of best and emerging next practices from his advisory work with technology intensive enterprises in energy, natural resources, finance, healthcare, IT, logistics, pharm/biopharm, semiconductors, telecoms, transportation, etc., spanning 40+ countries.

Mel Hughes has over 40 years of experience in aerospace-defense and national security. He began his career as a US Navy carrier-based fighter pilot and project test pilot. After joining Lockheed Martin, he held leadership roles as Manager of Systems Engineering, Peacekeeper ICBM; Chief Engineer, Small ICBM; Director, Business Development, Advanced Programs; Program Director, Peacekeeper ICBM, Small ICBM, and Titan II/IV Space Launch Vehicle; and President, Tactical Defense Systems business. After leaving Lockheed Martin, Mel was President/COO and CEO of two sector start-ups: MicroSat Systems and Innovative Space Propulsion Systems. He now consults full time specializing in the aerospace and defense industry, with a focus in helping business teams improve their program executional excellence planning and recovery supporting program schedule and fiscal performance.

He has leveraged his expertise to help a wide range of aerospace-defense contractors in winning new business capture and keep sold opportunities including Aerojet Rocketdyne, BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NASA, Northrop Grumman, United Launch Alliance, and Raytheon, among others. In this role Mel acted as advisor on over $500B in competitive bids, achieving a 100%-win-rate on programs such as Orion, GOES-R, GPS III, Joint Strike Fighter and GBSD or Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, in which he served as Chief Strategist to Northrop Grumman’s capture team. He holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in advanced aerospace engineering from Georgia Tech and is also a graduate of Harvard’s Advanced Management Program. He has worked on projects with Dr. Phillips since 2003, including client work at BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Sandia.

Dr. Stanton ‘Stan’ Sloane is a 30+ year veteran of the aerospace-defense business. After serving as an officer in the US Navy, Stan began his career in the aerospace and defense industry with General Electric Aerospace in 1984, which subsequently became Martin Marietta and Lockheed Martin. Stan served in a variety of roles including engineering, program management and business development. His last position at Lockheed Martin was Executive Vice President of Integrated Systems & Solutions (IS&S), a $5B, 14,000-person systems integration business, that was one of the major divisions of the company. He has also served as CEO of $1.8B SRA International, and held senior executive roles at Decision Sciences International, Comtech Telecommunications and Frequency Electronics, including positions as President, CEO and Director, and has served on the Board of three publicly traded firms.

It was during Stan’s tenure at Lockheed Martin as EVP that he collaborated closely with Dr. Phillips in developing a training course for new business capture teams aimed at integrating Lynn’s Customer Experience Engineering frameworks and concepts into IS&S’ new business capture and keep sold processes, with Stan authoring key elements of the core content that is still used in the training today, albeit upgraded and contemporized since. As recounted in this book, this work with Lynn led to all-time high contract win-rates. Among his academic accomplishments, Stan holds a bachelor’s degree in professional studies (Aeronautics) from Barry University; a master’s degree in human resources management, Pepperdine University; and a Doctor of Management, Weatherhead Business School, Case Western Reserve University. He also holds Airline Transport Pilot and Flight Instructor licenses.

Author acknowledgments.

The authors wish to acknowledge the many talented and dedicated aerospace-defense professionals, both within industry and government, that they had the good fortune to work with over the years and who had the patience to teach us, coach us and let us know when we were on the wrong path, and so in many ways they represent the unnamed coauthors of this book. They have contributed far more to the security of the nation than they will ever get credit for. Lynn would also like to acknowledge the contributions of his close colleague Professor Gordon Hewitt who has worked with Lynn on numerous executive education and consulting engagements outside of aerospace-defense. Gordon is one of the world’s foremost authorities on new-game competitive strategy and the role dominant logic can play impeding enterprise transformation. His insights on these topics are key elements of several chapters.

Introduction

Outlining the book’s purpose, positioning,

target audiences and reader objectives.

This book outlines best and emerging ‘next’ practices in Customer Experience (CX) Engineering that new business capture, keep-sold and campaign teams in the aerospace-defense sector tasked with choosing and delivering winning Customer Value Propositions (CVPs) can leverage to increase their company’s contract win rates, improve their corporation’s program executional excellence and boost employee engagement. To that end it defines, explains, and operationalizes the foundation concepts of CX Engineering first co-developed at Stanford and continuously honed in 30+ years of applications in companies globally, including extensive work by the authors across the aerospace-defense sector.

It provides vivid illustrations of how these concepts, despite their popularity and prevalence in all sorts of industry planning documents, are still widely misunderstood and misused in many aerospace and defense companies. Our observations, as you will read below, come from working with over 200 new business capture, keep sold, and campaign teams over the last two decades alone. These were not ephemeral engagements but ones that sometimes went on for months, and our roles were not just confined to being outside advisors, but in many cases one or more of us acted in senior leadership roles in capture oversight, directly managing teams while being held responsible for their outcomes.

If there is one prevailing theme that transcends this work across diverse companies and pursuits, it is this: In most new business capture assignments that we have worked on and the teams that we have supported, we encountered a prevailing dominant logic that characterizes the conventional thinking employed by most new business capture teams. This dominant logic is best described as inside-out and internally driven, an operating mindset predicated on trying to sell a target customer community on what the capture team’s enterprise and teaming partners are good at, couched within a framework of trying to offer the target community’s stakeholders a superior Customer Value Proposition (CVP).

This invariably takes the form of offering customers better performance, shorter schedule and a lower price, with the capture team relentlessly searching for and polishing up any ‘shiny’ new technology or capabilities they possess which they can claim as a proposal discriminator when likely it’s just a minor distinction unable to carry a team’s proposal to victory. As we document in subsequent chapters, this internally-driven approach to offering customers a CVP that is based on an inside-out view of better performance, schedule and cost is a legacy holdover dating back to the beginning of the industry when the CX battleground was driven by superior designs which led to better performance and cost.

This drove industry players to bid aggressively. An ‘all sins are forgiven’ mindset was adopted by the sector’s customers—i.e., as long as the products ultimately worked, all other lapses were overlooked, including schedule. Flash forward to today and little has changed. The current version of this mindset loads programs with huge risks to the schedule or budget with no adequate plans in place to manage the risk, resulting in an unvirtuous cycle where contractors chasing ‘ever-increasing performance’ by necessity begats ‘ever-increasing risk and cost.’ The majority of failed aerospace-defense programs cancelled due to cost and schedule issues vs. performance shortfalls is testimony to this conclusion.

This internally-driven, inside-out approach to new business captures stands in stark contrast to best practices espoused in this book, which are predicated on an outside-in, customer-centric, CVP-driven process that starts with gaining an imaginative understanding of the unmet need states and occasions of the stakeholders in a targeted customer community and works ‘backwards’ from that to envision solutions that far transcend what the customers themselves can begin to imagine on their own. This model, which is employed by the most valuable technology companies in the world, has shown great promise when it has been wielded by sector new business capture, campaign and keep sold teams.

As we recount in Chapter 2, one of our authors, Stan, who for 4 years was Executive Vice President running Lockheed Martin’s $5B Integrated Systems & Solutions (IS&S)—which was one of the major divisions of the corporation for whom Lynn and Mel worked as advisors supporting capture pursuits—put in place the requisite training, processes, incentives and organization infrastructure for IS&S’s new business capture and keep-sold teams to implement this outside-in, customer-centric, CVP-driven approach in their pursuits. This resulted in average win rates of ~85%, and in some years achieving higher 89% win-rates, a performance that was far above what the business had previously attained.

Some of these capture wins were among the largest and most high profile of the era such as Targets and Countermeasures, Fleet Ballistic Missiles (FBM), Strategic Weapons System (SWS), GeoScout, Global Positioning System or GPSIII, Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite System, R Series Program (GOES-R), and Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), among others, many of which involved multiple divisions at Lockheed beyond IS&S such as the company’s Space Systems Unit, etc. There were lessons learned from Stan’s initiative, one of the most important being that implementing an outside-in, customer-centric CVP-driven process for proposal development is extremely challenging.

But another was that its implementation can uncover unique and more insightful customer values that are significantly better competitively when compared to those generated using an internally-driven, inside-out process to offer customers better performance, shorter schedule and lower cost that so typifies most new business captures. As one example, in subsequent chapters, we describe Lockheed Martin’s win for Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV) program, subsequently known as Orion, which is the spacecraft built for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) Artemis program to explore the Moon, Mars and other destinations in the Solar System, planning for which began in 2004. ¹

While this book was being written in the Fall of 2022, the uncrewed Orion capsule of NASA’s Artemis I mission sailed within 80 miles of the lunar surface, achieving the closest approach to the moon for a spacecraft built to carry humans since Apollo 17 flew half a century ago. The Orion capture victory was huge for Lockheed Martin and its first in the history of human space flight. But its beginnings were far from auspicious. The competitor that Lockheed Martin faced in this capture pursuit was a Northrop Grumman/Boeing-led team, a team that with Boeing could claim that it had accomplished the greatest achievements not only in aviation history, but also in human history, with the Apollo/Saturn program.

That program took the first humans to the moon and brought together all of the major companies that were a part of Boeing to achieve this feat. Lockheed Martin, in contrast, had no such track record in human spaceflight and the early feedback that it received from NASA on its proposed CEV design was hardly promising. Lockheed’s team was told that their design was ugly, that NASA didn’t like the fact that Lockheed’s team which was based in Sunnyvale California, instead of collocated with them in Houston, that its capture manager and proposed program director were not willing to listen to NASA’s concerns and were not giving them a seat at the table, among other adverse negative feedback.

Acting on this input, senior leadership at Lockheed Martin decided to replace the CEV capture and program leadership with a new team who was comfortable in leaving its safety zone of offering better performance, shorter schedule and lower cost, and who were willing to venture into implementing a CVP-driven process in a last-ditch Herculean effort to turn around the Orion capture. In a subsequent chapter, we recount how this newly reinvigorated Lockheed team uncovered and proposed as the #1 Customer Experience (CX) in its Customer Value Proposition (CVP) to NASA to win the CEV/Orion contract a CX that had very little to do with better performance, shorter schedule and lower cost.

The insight the new Lockheed led-team gleaned via discussions with NASA stakeholders was that CEV/Orion was a program to secure jobs following NASA’s shuttle disasters. This CX wasn’t cited in the RFP nor explicitly stated in Lockheed’s proposal, but it guided the team’s response to Sections L & M, and it became a win theme echoed throughout the proposal such any evaluator of any assigned section got the message as loud and clear as if it was flashing across the illuminated signs of Minute Maid Park, a short drive from NASA’s Johnson Space Center. This illustrates a best-practice precept, that a CX included in a CVP which doesn’t explicitly satisfy an RFP requirement can still be a big plus.

By virtually all accounts, Lockheed’s strategy produced a stunning if unexpected victory. Prior to the award announcement, as many as 5 highly credible space industry analysts had picked the Northrop team to win according to Bloomberg. ² The examples described within this book all hew to this precept, namely that by deploying this outside-in, customer-centric, CVP-driven process, it produces rewards for enterprises that choose to traverse this path. The results go far beyond their implementation in just one company like Lockheed and throughout the book we cite instances where this process has been executed with success by teams spanning a wide range of Tier 1 & 2 aerospace-defense contractors.

Virtually all of these examples showcase the fact that teams wielding an outside-in, customer-centric, CVP-driven process defeat otherwise equally if not more capable teams using an old-game internally-driven, inside-out CVP-driven approach to offer customers "better performance, shorter schedule and lower cost". Perhaps the most dramatic recent example of this idea comes from Northrop Grumman’s Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) win vs. a Lockheed Martin-led team in which Mel was chief strategist working with Northrop’s capture team for 18 months, supported by Lynn at various stages in drafting and finalizing the CVP and execution model that guided Northrop to a stunning $85B win.

We recount this example at length in a subsequent chapter, but the essence of the story is this: At the outset of the competition, Northrop Grumman was considered to be the darkest of dark horses in a competition that included two historical GBSD incumbents, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, who worked on the original Minuteman 3 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) program that became operational long ago in 1970 and for which GBSD was to be the follow-on. Lockheed Martin’s capture strategy was a veritable monument to the internally-driven, inside-out CVP-driven process as a way to offer a targeted customer community of stakeholders better performance, shorter schedule and lower cost.

Given Lockheed’s prime contractor role with the US Navy’s Strategic Systems Program (SSP) on the Trident D5 program, Lockheed’s proposal focused on superior cost savings and shorter schedule by maximizing weapon system commonality. In contrast, Northrop’s led-team gleaned via its discussions with GBSD stakeholders in the US Air Force responsible for program oversight that the last thing they wanted was the Navy in the middle of their new strategic missile program for GBSD, and instead they proposed a new CX based on a concept of smart commonality that mitigated the Navy participating in GBSD supply chain meetings and decision making and improved security of the weapon system.

Not armed with these insights, Lockheed continued forward with its damn what customers want, full speed ahead internally-derived CVP based on maximizing ICBM commonality with the Navy’s ICBM. The result was that Lockheed Martin, who was heavily favored to win the competition, finished dead last in the evaluation, and sources said the main reason was their full-scale adoption of commonality. In an even more stunning move, Boeing subsequently announced its withdrawal from the $85B GBSD competition, citing concerns with how the Pentagon had handled the procurement and thus leaving Northrop Grumman as the only contender vying to replace the US Air Force’s Minuteman III ICBMs. ³

Beyond arming sector new business capture, keep sold and campaign teams with a methodology and process that can substantially increase capture win rates and improve program execution, there are other benefits for enterprises and teams that adopt the best practice precepts in this book. One thing we’ve noticed in our work across the sector over the past two decades is that concepts like Customer Value Proposition or CVP can take on diverse meanings across companies and even in different units within the same company, somewhat akin to the 15 different language dialect clusters of Swahili that are found across the African continent as well as several other pidgin forms that are still in use today.

This book establishes a powerful common language, mindset and operational philosophy based on a comprehensive and proven best-next practices CX Engineering framework that resolves this problem. In doing so, it will alter many executives’ narrow views within this sector about what these concepts mean and their breadth of application to corporate value creation processes across all key functional agendas in aerospace-defense beyond just those within business development, marketing, and sales. Readers will in turn come away with a perspective on how well their own enterprise, organization and specific functions are truly utilizing these concepts of CX Engineering and their underlying processes.

This helps readers to benchmark where their organization is in its evolution to becoming much more customer-centric and a master of CX Engineering best and emerging next practice precepts and processes, a goal that is relentlessly pursued by the most valuable companies in the world including Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. Readers will invariably come away with a quite different understanding of what customer-centricity is and isn’t and the import of leveraging best and emerging next practice disciplines in CX Engineering in their new business capture, campaign, and keep-sold processes. The book also challenges old-game managerial mindsets about the true source of competitive advantage.

The book documents how 21st century rivalry in a disruptive world is vastly different, detailing the most recent research on how CX leaders in an industry far outperform their peers. Timing for writing this book could not be more providential. The first two decades of 21st century rivalry and the research on the case studies that it has spawned have created a sea-change in executive thinking about the very nature of competitive advantage across virtually all industry sectors. Enterprises that weaponized CX have overturned markets and incumbents faster than any force in history due to the rapidly evolving new-game competitive landscapes that now characterize essentially all industry sectors globally. ⁴

Indeed, most industries are seeing a tectonic shift where the old-game model for creating customer and shareholder value is morphing to a new-game model amidst a landscape disrupted by powerful converging forces. These forces include rapidly advancing new digital technologies, a tsunami of new scientific discoveries and breakthroughs, increasing globalization, powerful socio-political trends in sustainability and ESG investing, new generations of customers with different value hierarchies, etc. This is forcing companies globally to reimagine their legacy CVP lineup using a best-practice, outside-in, customer-centric approach and experiment in the discovery of the next best practices before rivals.

Aerospace-defense is no different. The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community (IC) are embarking on huge enterprise transformation journeys as they face unprecedented pressure to prove relevancy and operate efficiently in a deteriorating global security situation typified by myriad new threats. Customer and contractor efforts to adapt to this landscape have created a treasure trove of lessons learned in best, next, and even worst practices that readers can apply to their businesses. While the book remains aerospace-defense sector focused, it highlights best practices outside of the sector relevant to challenges companies in national security face, using examples they can relate to.

Our goal is to help leaders mentally bridge the gap between what are best commercial practices and the government programs that they are trying to win. After all, aerospace-defense companies and their government customers are being increasingly urged to inject some Silicon Valley DNA inside their enterprises and adopt more commercial best practices, a trend in part catalyzed by the success of suppliers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft winning large DoD and Intelligence customer contracts. ⁵ Our intent is to give readers that aha moment that sparks them to thinking about how to adapt these commercial best and next practices to their particular activities and workflow processes.

Recapping these commercial sector lessons learned enables executives to identify relevant analogies beyond aerospace-defense. This is one of the benefits learners of this content have cited as impactful over the years. Far too often executives in aerospace-defense shelter behind the default position that ‘we are different’ when reality may not be like that at all if correct analogies can be re-contextualized as carriers of learning to their teams—precisely our goal here. That being said, we also detail how the aerospace-defense sector is unique as a crucible for successfully applying CX Engineering best and emerging next practices and highlight key nuances to keep in mind due to the industry’s uniqueness.

Target audiences that can benefit from best and emerging next practices precepts in this book.

The primary audience for this book are the members of cross-functional capture teams in Tier 1 and 2 contractors pursuing new business capture or keep-sold opportunities within the aerospace-defense sector, and the capture leadership that supports them. After all, a key success factor for these teams is the depth and breadth of CVP process buy-in, acceptance, embracement and execution by capture team leadership, the capture team and proposal section authors. If these groups are not supportive of the CVP-driven process that is outlined in this book, then its implementation as a successful proposal architecture is weakened from the outset and this book addresses how to overcome this challenge.

Another closely related audience to new business capture and keep-sold teams are campaign teams who are tasked with positioning their enterprise to win a disproportionate share of the future multiple contract awards for an emerging market and customer set. The examples here are many and diverse, spanning multiple market spaces, including campaigns to capture more from increased government investments in emerging technologies for securing space-based assets; speeding the development of hypersonic missiles, test technologies and infrastructure; advancing development of surface ships and underseas vehicles with no crews on board, known as unmanned maritime systems, to mention a few.

Players in the sector are changing their old-game legacy approach where independent research and development (IRAD) or other investments were mainly capture-specific and reactive in responding to customer-issued RFPs, an approach out of step with the changing landscape. Customers are finding environments other than RFPs to express their needs long before RFPs come out, enabling players to position themselves to solve a host of problems and invest in new capability and messaging platforms far left of RFPs. But many aerospace-defense companies remain novices at running campaigns and have much to learn from best, emerging next practices from campaigns run in the commercial world.

It is important to note here that buy-in, acceptance and embracement of a CVP-driven approach by any new business capture, keep sold or campaign teams must go well beyond just the leadership and the individual contributors on these teams. Efforts should be made by capture-campaign leadership to get two other key groups to be on-board with the CVP-driven process: Color team reviewers and select senior corporate leadership. The first group, color-coded review teams—pink, red, gold, green, etc.—are employed to scrutinize a team’s RFP response and bring it to completion in a final winning form, with different color-coded reviews indicating increasing levels of proposal development maturity.

This typically entails having different review groups evaluate such issues as the presence or absence of CVP win themes and discriminators, a proposal’s compliance with the RFP requirements, and the responsiveness to the customer’s needs that produced the RFP in the first place, among other critical success criteria. Major disruption to a capture team’s proposal strategy can occur at these team color reviews if color team advisors are not well integrated into, educated and briefed on the team’s CVP proposal-driven process. Too often, color team reviewers will attend reviews without any knowledge of the CVP process or its outputs, thereby creating an alignment problem that is often hard to overcome.

Moreover, color team reviewers are often senior well-respected members of the community with most all having had distinguished careers and who possess direct communication lines to the top echelons of influential stakeholders in the contractor corporation and the targeted customer community. Without understanding the process and its outputs, it is not surprising when these advisors provide negative commentary on a proposal strategy that emerges from a process that they’re unfamiliar with. After all, a team’s CVP proposal-driven process will often deemphasize typical ‘old-game’ tenets of promising customers the higher performance, shorter schedule and lower cost CX’s they’re so used to seeing.

This is problematic if color team reviewers go on to communicate their misgivings to senior executive colleagues, especially if the latter group is also unacquainted with a CVP-driven proposal process. We have seen instances where this ‘perfect storm’ created by a lack of alignment can be very disruptive to preceding proposal work and cause extensive turmoil and rewriting very late in the process. So, it is imperative color team reviewers must also be added to the target audience for this book. These same points apply to company leadership, especially Vice Presidents who own internal functional processes governing captures and campaigns and must help remove obstacles that can thwart capture success.

Leadership at these levels must realize that capture and campaign teams may have to defy deeply rooted but often outdated legacy ‘dominant logic’ assumptions that are holdovers from past ways of winning that no longer apply in a fast-changing new-game competitive landscape. Indeed, this book recounts a number of stunningly successful examples of new business pursuits that had to execute some processes differently in order to deliver a winning proposal or campaign. Vice Presidents and other senior leaders who enabled this to happen were crucial in driving up the Probability of Winning or Pwin for the case studies detailed herein, so this level of leadership is another key target audience.

Finally, US Government (USG) acquisition stakeholders who serve on a Source Selection Evaluation Board (SSEB), a Source Selection Advisory Committee (SSAC) or act as Source Selection Authority (SSA) are another important target audience for this book. We believe that having USG stakeholders assess a proposal bid through the lens of a CX Engineering best practices mindset or even signaling to contractors that a CX-CVP driven proposal is a beneficial path to follow can help USG customers to get better proposals from industry and achieve more successful program outcomes. This is especially important in an era in which so many programs are judged to not meet budgetary and schedule goals.

Consequently, this book also presents a series of checklists and templates for USG stakeholders to assess whether or not a vying bidding contractor team has employed a commercial best-practices, outside-in, customer-centric process in generating their team’s proposal. These insights can be used to predict whether acceptance of a contractor’s proposal would result in a successful acquisition that will reliably produce the desired mission capabilities and outcomes on time and within budget via the delivery of the requisite customer experiences (CXs) to target DOD, IC, and civilian stakeholders. Our work with acquisition stakeholders over time affirms that these ideas advance pursuit of their goals.

We also believe the ideas in this book can be used by USG stakeholders in other ways to drive more acquisitions that translate into successful programs. There has been a deluge of recommendations from industry, government, think tanks and experimental DOD units like Defense Innovation Unit, all calling for reform to bring greater speed, agility, innovation, and relevance to the acquisition process to keep pace with rival nations that the US faces in the global power struggle. Within this milieu, we offer suggestions on how USG acquisition teams can improve the requirements gathering process by using a more robust stakeholder engagement model that is based on the ideas advanced in this book.

Recap of book objectives and benefits companies and readers will get by learning its content.

Here then is a recap of our objectives in writing this book and end-result benefits that enterprises and the different reader audiences targeted by the book noted above will gain by absorbing its content:

1. Explain the profound differences between an internally-driven, inside-out CVP-driven process and an outside-in, customer-centric CVP-driven process for CX Engineering in new business captures.

2. Provide a common language, mindset, and methodology for how capture, keep-sold and campaign teams can leverage CX Engineering best/emerging next practices to improve win rates and execution.

3. Provide case study examples from real-world aerospace-defense engagements where the teams leveraged best and emerging next practices in CX Engineering to create game-changing strategies.

4. Lay a foundation for readers to evaluate how well their team, enterprise and function is optimizing use of CX Engineering concepts-processes and impacting bottom line performance in applying them.

5. Get them excited to apply core CX concepts like Customer Value Proposition (CVP); Value Delivery System (VDS); Day-In-The-Life-Of-Customers (DITLOC) and Customer Value Delivery Chain (VDC).

6. Change any pre-existing conceptions of what these concepts mean