September 2024 | Issue #32
It is back-to-school time and the unofficial start of Fall and CONSTANT is brimming with excitement over some key recent wins. Namely a multifaceted, community forward contract with the Bay Area UASI and our third (yes, third!) consecutive Task Order award with FEMA FQS. No doubt, our team’s commitment to doing great work is undoubtedly resulting in repeat and referral business, further enabling us to execute our mission.
We’ve also moved into a new phase of strategic planning for the organization. In years prior, we’ve focused on strengthening our hiring process, implementing technologies, and building leadership. Now we pivot to an intense investment in building out a next-level business development capability for CONSTANT. This is both in response to the market and to a next big step in our organizational maturity. Over the years, we have conquered being a solely LA firm, then solely a California firm, then solely a SLTT firm. We’re now firmly entrenched as a SLTT and Federal government contracting firm – right where we want to be – and we are working to get the next level of meaningful growth. As I spoke of last week, sometimes the journey is faster, slower, or different than we plan; either way we find ways to succeed like we have so elegantly done for the past 20 years. I’m eager to step up to the challenges of today and the future, and make an impact on our industry and in our people’s lives. As always, thank you for all you do.
Pic: My four children Xavier (8), Ezekiel (6), Isaiah (3) and Isabella (3) and my husband John and I at an Angel’s game this past weekend.
CONSTANT's September Birthdays
Happy Birthday to our September crew!
- September 5 – Morgan Forrest
- September 6 – Lenah Mansour
- September 9 – Tracy To
- September 21 – Mona Bontty
- September 22 – Pattijean Hooper
- September 23 – Dylan Yates
- September 26 – Christina Chapper
Hope it’s full of pumpkin spice and everything nice!
Autumn Leaves and Fall Opportunities: Perfecting Your Master Resume This Season
Business Development by Jeff Philippart, Business Development Director
During the Summer Summit, the BD Team spoke about the proposal development process and conducted an interactive activity on ‘win themes.’ In the presentation, we outlined traditional core elements of proposal responses found in a Request for Proposal (RFP). The BD Team structures its proposals to align with RFP requirements and scoring criteria. Traditionally, this includes addressing elements such as the work plan/solution to address the scope of work, past performance, price/cost proposal, understanding, and staffing plan. In this article, we’ll dive into the staffing plan portion of proposal responses and remind you why it is highly important to have an updated, comprehensive master resume on file.
- What does a staffing plan entail? When CONSTANT provides a staffing plan within a proposal, we traditionally provide the prospective client with an overview of how we anticipate staffing the project and what personnel we have available with requisite qualifications and experience. This usually involves providing an organization chart, resumes, and/or tables showing team member roles and responsibilities and experience and qualifications.
- Excerpt from Real-World RFP: “Identification of staff’s capabilities and the Project Manager assigned to oversee the work; an organization chart showing the proposed relationships between all key personnel and the support staff assigned to the Project; the proposed responsibilities of each person on the chart, and brief resumes of all personnel assigned to the project.”
- Staff qualifications will be assessed for 10%-40% of the total scoring criteria.
- Most federal proposals have distinct minimum qualifications for each labor category, such as years of experience or level of education.
- Sometimes, expanded information will be requested. This includes items like individual team member references, a description of team member projects and availability, letters of commitment, etc.
- How does the BD Team craft resumes for proposal resumes? The short answer to this question is that we use the master resumes available on file to craft tailored resumes aligned to a specific opportunity. For example, if we are chasing an Emergency Operations Plan (EOP) project for a California client, we are likely pulling emergency management plan development/update examples from your master resume, and likely not featuring work that may not be entirely applicable (ex: a healthcare training).
- I do not have a master resume on file yet, how should I proceed? It is extremely important for all Operations Team members to have a master resume, and a master resume tutorial session is provided during onboarding. Please refer to the Master Resume SharePoint page for more information, including the template, tutorial, quick-tips, and more. If you need a refresher, Nicole is available for support!
- I do have a master resume on file; however, how can I maximize my master resume? Here are a couple of tips to make sure your resume is optimized for any proposal:
- Overwrite rather than underwrite. No one knows a project/task/role that you have been part of better than you do. When crafting a description of past projects/tasks/roles, include as much information as possible, answering questions like: What were the deliverables and what was their purpose? What process was used to develop the deliverables? What stakeholders were engaged? What meetings, events, data collection, etc. were undertaken? The BD Team can edit the resume to fit the needs of a particular proposal, but we cannot add elements for projects that we are not aware of, especially pre-CONSTANT.
- Remember to include both what the project/task/role was as well as the part that you played within it. This allows you to feature projects or tasks that you may not have led but still supported.
- If tasks/duties do not fall perfectly within a project description, particularly from pre-CONSTANT roles, still create a description for this experience. A strong example of this is found on Mona’s resume, where she describes her duties for Cal OES under the “Program Management” subheading.
- When developing the master resume, ensure you include as much information as you can, especially pre-CONSTANT. Once you have a strong draft, you can then update your master resume monthly.
When master resumes are updated frequently, the BD team can better align proposal resumes with current projects and capture new capabilities. CONSTANT’s ability to win new work is a collective accomplishment of CONSTANT’s past performance as well as the qualifications and experiences of our collective team. Thank you to all our team members for developing and updating your master resumes. Should you need any assistance, please reach out to Nicole.
Strategy Season
Operations by Jayson Kratoville
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail” -Benjamin Franklin (also Taylor Swift)
As we head into autumn and the leaves change (for some of us), it’s good timing to dive into our annual reevaluation of our strategic plan. At Summer Summit, we spent some time looking back at what we’ve accomplished and ahead at what comes next. We’ve been compiling the team’s input from team discussions, survey results, and our SWOT analysis to define priorities for next year and beyond. In September, we also start looking at next year’s budget.
We will be circulating a draft of the strategic plan update around November for comment. In the meantime, you can help by:
- Connecting with your manager on how you hope to see the organization grow and your vision for growing with it.
- Brainstorming about clear goals, measurable objectives, specific actions, and reliable measures of success.
- Helping prioritize what we should be focusing on as a team. As we think about the big picture and long term, we can have anything we want, but we can’t have everything we want. How we triage our wants is what defines our direction.
My door is always open for a chat. Have a wonderful end to the summer and a happy transition into fall.
Autumn Leaves Me Speechless...
People and Culture by Maggie Peters, Director of People and Culture & Alyssa De La Cruz Sr. HR Business Partner
Great Place to Work – We Recertified for the Fifth Year in a Row! Congratulations to everyone at CONSTANT! This is a great achievement we made as a team. Thanks for your effort in participating in this annual survey! Please celebrate by sharing on your social media channels.
During our recent All Staff meeting, we reviewed the results of this survey. While we were pleased to see positive ratings in many areas, we also acknowledged that Pay and Professional Development were rated lower than we would like. We understand that these are important issues for our team, and we’re committed to taking proactive steps to improve them.
The results have been shared and your continuous feedback, commentary, and recommendations are always welcome. Share your ‘crazy’ idea, a ‘what if we…’
Preserving and strengthening our positive culture is an ‘all play.’ We can never take that for granted. We have many strengths to continue to build upon. We also have clear areas to focus on improving. Thank you, as always, for your candor and mindfulness in growing this organization to be the best.
2024 Summer Summit Survey Results: Well now, let’s review. This Summer Summit may well have been the “BEST ever!” True quotes. We achieved a 94% positive rating. We incorporated many things that we received in prior surveys (thank you for completing this year’s Summer Summit survey which is the reason this summit rated so highly). The themes that we learned were:
- You really liked the interactive sessions and variety of ways to connect (chat, breakout rooms, meeting breaks)
- In particular, you liked the Future of CONSTANT, BD Workshop, PI Workshop, Cyber TTX and Teambuilding event.
- You loved the CONSTANT logo’d earbuds and snacks. (who doesn’t!?@?)
P&C Check-In’s: Our Way to Connect With You: Hey Team! We announced wayyyyy back in May (and several times since through All Staff meetings and the newsletter) that Alyssa and I would be starting brief, “check ins.” It’s our way to connect and just hang out with you for a bit. We love finding out what is happening in your world or maybe answering a question you’ve been pondering. We set up a “P&C Check-In” invite on your calendar and include a comment in the invite about the purpose. These check-ins have been great!
Important September Dates:
- September 2: Holiday, Labor Day – CONSTANT Closed
- September 5: Payday $$
- September 11: Expense Reports Due
- September 13: Timesheets Due and Great Place to Work Survey Closes
- September 17: Manager’s Huddle
- September 19: Expense Reports Due
- September 20: Payday $$
- September 30: Timesheets Due
Professional Development/Training: We recently had Sarah Novak and Dylan Yates present a CONSTANT University Professional Development on “Survey Development and Data Analysis.” Thank you, Sarah and Dylan, for providing this insightful information to the team. We’ll be posting on our isolved/CONSTANT University shortly for anyone who would like to view it. This training will also automatically be captured in your Training and Development in isolved. If you don’t see it, please send an email to HR@Constantassociates.com and we will update your record.
Help Us Attract Talent – GlassDoor Reviews: Studies show a significant portion of job seekers consult Glassdoor reviews to learn about company culture, compensation, and work-life balance before applying or making a final decision about an offer. Please post a positive review on GlassDoor when you have a moment. This platform is so important for us to continue to attract quality candidates like YOU!
Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)
EDI by Co-Leads Manny Rodriguez, Maggie Peters, and Alyssa De La Cruz
For September, Mona Lisa Bontty wrote an amazing article on Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15th to October 15th. Sincere thanks to Mona for a very insightful article! And thanks to all the volunteers for writing these important articles so we can continue to learn together!
Special thanks also to Manny Rodriguez for refreshing our EDI SharePoint site. The site is more streamlined, easier to navigate, and quicker to find articles and resources. Thanks, Manny! Nice job!
Next Meeting: We will be revising our meeting format based on your feedback. Thank you for your recommendations! Our next EDI Committee Meetings will be September 25 and November 20. The meeting is linked on the Staff Calendar. All meeting presentations and educational articles can be found on the P&C SharePoint site under the EDI Committee tile.
Reach out to Manny, Alyssa and Maggie, EDI Co-Leads, if you need to assist a client with their EDI efforts or how to incorporate EDI into our engagement.
Sweater Late Than Never
Finance By Carmen Khouri, Controller
As fall rolls around the corner and the year is more than halfway through, now is a good time to consider maxing out your 401(k) contributions. Like the squirrel who gathers their nuts in preparation for winter, creating a sold retirement plan will help with future goals. There is more than enough time to work out your finances and consider if this is something you would like to complete before the end of the year.
Deferral limits for 401(k) plans: $23,000
Catch-up contributions for those age 50 and over: $7,500
For more details on max contributions, you can visit the IRS website on 401(k) which is linked here.
Fall is in the Air and Football is INTUNE
Information Technology By Morgan Forrest, IT Manager
As we continue to discuss Intune, lets focus on how it helps us to improve security. Intune allows us to centralize all our digital assets in one location. We can use it to implement policies as well as to update each asset with the latest OS updates. Antivirus updates and scanning features are also available. When we travel, Intune can track and ensure we are being protected both domestically and internationally.
Our goal is to comply with CMMC which follows the NIST framework. I want to thank everyone for their assistance with getting us closer to Step 2.
Thank you all for your support during the tabletop exercise! Please feel free to send me any more ideas or thoughts that you may have had since the tabletop.
If you have any questions or IT issues, please submit a form ticket. GO DAWGS!
Congratulations to last month’s Brain Games winner, Derek, who guessed the US would win 110 medals/ 35 gold in the Olympics. Team USA took home 126 medals/40 gold. Thanks for playing!
September 6th is National Read A Book Day!
On Friday, Brea will ask everyone to share the last book they read. Share yours on Teams and we will pick someone at random to buy a new book for!
Our mission is to make the world a safer place.
It’s that simple, and that’s why we are here. We have a strategic plan for the next three years, called CONSTANT Strategy, which outlines what our biggest priorities are:
- Take care of our people
- Forward our mission
- Respond to our clients’ most pressing needs
- Expand strategically across markets
- Build infrastructure for the future
To help us execute on our mission, we have developed the CONSTANT Credo and our aligned core values (see the graphic below). We live by these.
CONSTANT Credo
