My 5-year-old daughter, when working on a puzzle, knows to glance at the whole picture first, before starting to assemble the pieces. She is up to 30-piece puzzles now, which have gotten quite complex. So, her process is to study the picture, and then find a corner piece to which she then starts adding pieces.
We, as adults, sometimes forget to take a step back and look at the whole picture first when we solve our own puzzles: how to grow our company, how to win a proposal, or how to bring in revenue. This is why, to win government contracts, it is important to step back and take a few minutes to ponder the full lifecycle of business development. This way we can be better at putting the pieces together.
A typical business development lifecycle for a government contracting company (covered more in depth at http://www.ostglobalsolutions.com/blueprint) consists of the following pieces:
