How GovCons can manage teaming in an increasingly competitive environment
If you work in government contracting, you’ve probably felt the shift. Timelines are shrinking. Expectations are rising. And there’s more pressure to compete effectively with fewer resources. Whether you’re pursuing work as a prime or supporting a larger effort, teaming has become essential…but also more difficult to manage.
Here’s what we’re hearing from across the industry: you’re juggling more proposals, working with more partners, and dealing with shorter windows to assemble a team. That means there’s less time to vet relationships, less room for error, and more risk of working with the wrong partner on the wrong pursuit.
And in the GovCon world, a partner one day can be a competitor the next. Keeping this in mind can help you beat the competition or join forces, depending on which is the right move on that day.
Some of the most common challenges we’ve seen include:
Tracking partner performance. Many teams struggle to keep a reliable record of how teaming partners performed on previous efforts. Feedback lives in email threads or in someone’s head. That lack of visibility makes it hard to choose partners with confidence.
What helps: Build a centralized, shared log of past teaming experiences that’s accessible to business development, proposal teams, and leadership. Include key takeaways like role played, quality of contribution, and communication responsiveness.
Coordinating across departments. Business development may have relationships with certain firms. Delivery teams may have very different experiences with those same partners. Without a clear handoff or shared perspective, decisions get made in a vacuum.
What helps: Introduce a standard internal debrief process after each contract, where capture and delivery teams share notes on partner performance. Store those notes in a consistent, searchable format.
Maintaining institutional knowledge. When team members leave or move roles, so does the knowledge about which partners were helpful, which ones underdelivered, and which ones backed out at the last minute.
What helps: Document partner engagement at the project level, not just by company. Capture who was involved, what their responsibilities were, and how the relationship evolved.
Staying compliant. You’re often asked to show past performance and explain subcontracting history in proposals. Without a structured way to store that data, you’re stuck pulling together records at the last minute.
What helps: Maintain a running archive of subcontractor engagements tied to specific contracts. Make sure these records include scope, period of performance, and any notable outcomes, so proposal writers can access them quickly.
Making fast, informed decisions. Under tight deadlines, your team needs to be able to look back at previous pursuits, see who was involved and how, and understand how the team functioned. When that context isn’t available, people default to what is familiar or convenient—not necessarily what is best.
What helps: Organize information by opportunity, not just by partner. When reviewing potential teaming options, teams should be able to filter past experiences by contract type, agency, and partner role – whether competitor or partner.
These are practical steps rather than massive overhauls. And they make a real difference. When you have access to shared context, your team makes smarter decisions. When everyone is working from the same playbook, the risk of missteps goes down.
Picture a better experience. You’re chasing a new opportunity. Instead of relying on memory, your team can easily access past teaming arrangements. You can see which firms supported similar efforts. How they contributed. What worked. What didn’t. Proposal writers can reference real examples. Delivery teams can weigh in early. Leadership can feel confident in the choices being made.
It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being prepared. With the right context, your team can avoid repeat mistakes, strengthen key relationships, and build pursuit strategies that align with how you actually deliver.
And beyond helping you win, managing teaming relationships more thoughtfully can help you deliver better outcomes. Partners come in with a clearer understanding of expectations. Roles are defined early. Handoffs are smoother. The result is less friction and fewer surprises.
Teaming in GovCon isn’t going away. In fact, it’s becoming more important as agencies look for specialized capabilities, expand and aggregate contracts, and primes aim to broaden their reach. But to make teaming a real advantage, you need to be able to manage it with clarity.
The firms that do this well aren’t necessarily working harder. They’re working with better visibility. They’re not scrambling to remember who did what. They’re building on what they already know.
If these challenges sound familiar, it may be time to take a closer look at how your team manages teaming partners today. Start small. Focus on capturing what you learn after each pursuit. And build from there. Because in a world where every proposal counts and every relationship matters, clarity is more than helpful. It’s essential.
That’s where a project-based CRM can make a difference. It gives your team a consistent, centralized place to store and access all the context that matters, by project, not just by company. You can log partner performance, track engagement history, and keep records tied to specific pursuits. It’s helps make sure your team has what they need to make fast, informed decisions every time.
Unanet also offers plenty of opportunities for you to stay informed about your industry. We have an online customer community and meet up groups for existing customers. We also have a deep resource library with best practices and guidance on how to succeed as a GovCon. For more on how we can help, check out our website and reach out with any questions
