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Business acquisition and growth in medium- or large-scale organizations depends on successfully winning project contracts in a highly competitive environment, where organizations compete fiercely to outrun each other. A proposal is the starting point of almost all projects. Effective and timely bid management can significantly enhance an organization's ability to win contracts, and it also results in customer satisfaction and increased customer confidence.
By using a bid management framework with features such visualization and prioritization, you can manage proposals far more efficiently. This guide explains how to customize IBM® Rational® Focal Point™ to implement a system that tracks the proposal process from requirements gathering through workflow and outcome, and shows the real-time status of the bids and proposals along the way.
Typical proposal management process
A proposal is the starting phase for every project in the software development cycle. A proposal is where the first set of requirements for a project flows in from the sponsor or the business stakeholder. Each proposal has its own lifecycle, complexity, and issues. (For this purpose, we use proposal interchangeably with bid, and bid management is the end-to-end process.)
The bid management team (or proposal management team) oversees the process. That team works quite hard to achieve a "pipeline" filled with projects that is won from proposals, and these projects vary a lot in nature and complexity. A bid management team has many stakeholders with different responsibilities:
- The central role is that of the Bid Manager, who coordinates with everybody in the organization to help make the bid successful.
- Business Unit Heads play a critical role in the decisions of bidding and
recruiting resources, such as:
- Subject matter experts (SMEs)
- IT analysts to investigate the technical viability of the bid.
- Financial analysts play an important role in bid pricing and restructuring.
Each of these stakeholders can influence the proposal in different ways.
In most cases, organizations have a well-defined and documented bid or proposal management process in place that guides this team. But a process doesn't add value until there is a support infrastructure to implement the process.
Typical problems without a way to manage the process
The following are difficulties that are usually encountered when bid management is based solely on a defined process:
- Information about the bid is available only in email communications. Accessing any relevant information about the bid is difficult and time-consuming, if not impossible. Also, getting accurate information is a manual and challenging process. This increases the time to resolve and respond to the issues, thus slows down the whole process and lowers the success rates.
- Because bid management is a very dynamic process, many crucial decisions need to be made on the spot, during discussions with customers. Sometimes, the bid team is not in a position to reach people to extract the necessary information. In the absence of a mechanism for easily accessible, correct, verifiable, and searchable information, these decisions can backfire.
- If the bid process is not recorded in an information system, its history remains only in the memories of the people involved. Those memories fade, and those people move to other departments or leave the company. Therefore, the organization loses the learning, as well as the history of the bids, for future reference.
- When the bid information is not in a centralized system, there is a lack of visibility at the CXO level so that executives cannot check the status of all proposals.
All of these problems hamper the quick and successful completion of the bid and can result in prospective customers who might not think twice before awarding the contract to competitors.
What is missing here, then? A well-aligned and robust software tool that complements and strengthens the well-defined process for bids and makes bid management smooth and efficient.
How Rational Focal Point helps solve those problems
Rational Focal Point provides a highly customizable environment to create screens to capture data, to add validations to that data, define a process workflow and to create customized reports and views. It also has notification capabilities that can be triggered by business events.
Defining a template for the proposal is one of the most crucial activities for an effective bid management system. A well-defined system should capture all of the necessary data that will help manage and successfully convert a proposal and bid to a project. A proposal is initiated by the Business Unit Head during a discussion with the sponsor. Subsequently, a management and technical team, such as a Bid Manager and an IT Analyst, take the proposal further through series of discussion, data collation, and feasibility analysis that culminates in a proposal that contains the project estimate and a high-level description of the plan.
Create the bid management system
The sections that follow show you how to put all of these together to create a bid management system to overcome the problems listed in the previous section.
Before you start customizing Rational Focal Point, there are several things you need to do first:
- The high-level requirements for what the system needs to achieve must be documented.
- The fields, attributes, and data that need to be monitored and controlled must be finalized. This includes data related to planning, estimation, details of the proposal, risks, and so forth.
- The lifecycle that the proposal will follow needs to be streamlined.
- The kind of reports that are part of reporting need to be identified.
After all of these are clearly identified within the project team, you can get started with the following steps:
- Define a Proposal module template.
- Define attributes for the module.
- Create sample views based on the module.
- Attach a workflow to a sample view.
- Add project members.
Define a Proposal module template
A Proposal module is a template that is used to gather data related to the proposal. It contains the data that represents the semantics of a project, called attributes, and also enables different stakeholders who have permission to create, update, and delete data.
- Create a workspace. After logging into Rational Focal Point, a user who has admin rights can choose a workspace from a predefined set of workspace templates or choose a blank template.
When the workspace has been created, it provides a facility to create modules, views, and reports.
- To create the new module template, select Configure > Module > Add Module.
Figure 1. Creating a module in the Configure > Modules view
After you have finished creating the Proposal module, the next step is to define the module's attributes. The attributes capture the details of the essential data that will be needed to analyze and prepare the proposal.
Figure 2. Adding attributes
Rational Focal Point provides different types of attributes as shown in Figure 3. We have already identified the major attributes that are essential for bid management from the available set of attributes that Focal Point provides:
- Attributes that capture milestones or schedules can use the Date attribute.
- Attributes that capture information such as status, source of work, or priority can use the Choice attribute.
- Similarly, if you need to link to existing data in another workspace or the current workspace, such as Users, you can use the Link attribute.
- For Budget or Resource fields, use the Matrix attribute.
Additionally, you need a Choice attribute that defines the various phases or states of the proposal. This is required because a workflow defined in the next section will use it.
Figure 3. Attributes supported by Rational Focal Point
Figure 4 shows a sample of a finished Proposal module.
Figure 4. A sample module for a proposal
Attach workflows to the module
A module created in the view shown in the previous screen capture presents a snapshot of the system at any point in time. But a proposal system moves through different states. For example, in a normal system, you're likely to have several states, such as these examples:
- Proposal Initiation
- Proposal Under Investigation
- Proposal Closed
- Proposal Approved for Implementation
- Proposal Deferred
To be able to provide a dynamic behavior to the module that was created in the previous step, you need to define a workflow.
- To add a new workflow, select Configure > Workflows.
Figure 5. Configuring a workflow
- Associate the workflow with a module. In this case, link it to the Proposal module that you already created.
- Select the phase (state) attribute that you defined earlier as the workflow attribute.
- To define state transitions for the workflow, along with access permissions for each attribute, click Add Transition.
Figure 6. Defining state transitions for the Proposal Initiated phase
Create sample views for proposals
The views depict the dynamic nature of the system. By defining views, the current snapshot of the system can be derived. Views are created based on rules that are used to filter the content that is shown. Rules are logical expressions based on the attributes of the system. Therefore, any attribute or set of attributes can be used to define a view rule. Also, the permissions on each attribute (read/write) can be defined in the view.
- For example, to create a view to show "All Proposals," select Configure > View > Add View.
- Then complete these sections (see Figure 7):
- View Information
- Mandatory Attributes
- Access Information
Note: The view must be assigned to the module that it will be based on. In this case, that is the Proposals module
Figure 7. Creating a view
The kind of proposals that will be shown in the view can be controlled through the rules created.
When a view is created, new rules are added that define the view. The rules are based on the attributes of the module.
- If you want to add rules, select Views > Add Rule (see Figure 8).
Figure 8. Assigning rules
- Define read/write permissions for each attribute of the module, along with the workflow that it will be based on for the view (see Figure 9).
Figure 9. Define access permissions for attributes in a view
The finished proposal workflow view for Display > All Proposals, in Figure 10, shows all active proposals.
Figure 10. A sample view
The system you have created can have multiple users, each with a different and defined set of responsibilities and permissions. For example, perhaps only the Business Unit Head or a Bid Manager has permission to initiate proposals. Similarly, the Bid Manager and IT Analyst would have permissions to update data for the proposals that they own. Finally only a Business Unit Head may have permissions to move the proposal to Approval state based on the data that has been presented in the system.
Before you create members in your system, you need to define users for the Rational Focal Point system. Each user can be a member of more than a workspace.
- From the view screen (Display > All Users in this case), simply select Users > Add User, as Figure 11 shows.
Figure 11. Add Rational Focal Point users
You can assign users of your Focal Point system to the Bid Management workspace as Members.
- To add a user to a workspace, select Members > Add Member.
Figure 12. Assigning permissions to members
This article has shown all components in Rational Focal Point that you need to use for creating a proposal management system. In a follow-up article, we will guide you through how to create and use a sample proposal in a real-life scenario involving different users and states.
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Jyothi Rao is the development manager of the IBM Platform Technology Centre for Application and Integration Middleware Software in Bangalore, India. She has managed and led several Platform Technology Centre port projects across IBM brands and on several platforms, including HP-UX, IBM AIX, Linux on IBM System z, and IBM z/OS.
Satyajit Panda is an IT consultant and development manager for the Application and Integration Middleware Software division in the IBM Software Group. His diverse background and broad experience includes working in IT as a development manager, architect, programmer, team lead, process and agile coach, and technical analyst. He has worked in customer-facing roles in various industry domains, including retail, shipping, telecommunications, and software lifecycle management.
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