October 5, 2005

Better proposals — feedback from evaluators

Captureplanning.com has a great insight into what proposal evaluators are looking for, what they do not like to have to read through, and what type of information delivers the strongest proposal. There is a wide range of evaluator types included in the…
October 4, 2005

Small Business Report leaves questions

An article at FCW.com points out that the Small Business Administration may have overstated the percentage of federal contracts going to small businesses in a recently released report. An Aug. 25 SBA report states that the government awarded small businesses $69.2…
October 3, 2005

The Information Pioneers

Last week I attended the a reunion of the NSFnet crowd — lots of people whose names you probably don’t know (and a few whose names you’d recognize immediately, like Dave Farber), who 20 years ago developed the standards and the systems that…

What not to say in proposals — a quick list

What Not To Say In Proposals is a good resource for review prior to submitting a proposal. Since proposals are the final chapter in closing professional services and development projects, it never hurts to get advice and reminders of what might make…
September 30, 2005

Small businesses struggle to win business after Hurricane Katrina

With the need for emergency efforts and immediate response, small businesses fall short of providing their services in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, even though they want to be able to offer assistance and be part of the recovery. Why? …

Amendment could hurt small businesses

(Via VAR Business)  There is currently a proposed DOD pricing amendment that will require prime contractors engaged in time and materials contracts with federal agencies to pass through subcontractor rates for firms added to a program after contract award. Unfortunately this will…
September 14, 2005

Experiments in Rapid System Restoration using Tardiff

One great feature of Linux and other Unix variants is that you can quickly make a “bare metal” restoration or duplicate of a system provided you have a full backup of the original.  (With Windows, the registry requires special tools in order…
September 9, 2005

Running Linux Fedora Core 2 on VMWare 4.0.0

At TCG, many of our servers are running Fedora Core 2.  As an emergency restore technique, I wanted to be able to quickly recreate a server on a VMWare virtual machine running FC2.  In addition, virtual machines are a great way of quickly creating…
September 1, 2005

CMMI FAQ

TCG’s Senior CMMI Level 2 Mentor, Maureen Sullivan, just published a great article on www.tcg.com: What is CMMI Level 2 … and How Do We Get There?: A Brief Guide to CMMI Level 2 for Small Software Development Organizations. The article is intended to…
August 30, 2005

NGP article in GCN

Before I went on vacation last week I was interviewed by Government Computer News’ Jason Miller about the National Grants Partnership’s first white paper. The resulting article was published yesterday and I think it captures the core of the white paper very well,…