Company

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Business Intelligence
Project Proposal

Agenda
Need for Proposal

Proposal life cycle

Proposal contents

Need for Proposal

Activity that brings the client and vendor together

Activity that defines the scope, timeframe and cost of the project, at a broad level, which then becomes the basis for the entire project
Within an organization, the purpose of proposal is to just get approval from the management firstly about whether to undertake the project or not and if project is approved, then about schedule, resources, cost.

For big organizations, proposal is the basis on which, vendor is selected for the actual work.
Fits in the first phase of project life cycle viz. project initiation

Proposal Life Cycle

Request for Proposal (RFP) generated by client for vendors

Proposal Writing by vendor Proposal Submission by vendor and Approval by client

Project Begins

Some steps can be omitted or combined with other steps.

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Proposal Life Cycle (Contd.)

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Request for Proposal

Proposal can get initiated in different ways For BI team within an organization, the request can come just as a simple business problem document For a service type of organization, the input can come as a formal Request For Proposal (RFP) document. It could be for a specific business problem or for complete outsourcing of BI activity or setting up new BI activity for the client or just for providing BI resources to the client for specific period and so on.

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Proposal Life Cycle (Contd.)

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Proposal Writing
Response to RFP is proposal. It is the very first version of project plan. Proposal making itself is small project, having specific deliverable, and due date. For writing such proposals, an appropriate team needs to be formed, containing owner of the proposal. The team needs resources with different backgrounds and skills for writing different sections (e.g. project manager, technical architect, QA manager, marketing person and so on) and proposal owner coordinates and links them all. Sometimes, client visits, discussions, demos are arranged by the client to give the vendors more information required for detailed proposal.

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Proposal Life Cycle (Contd.)

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Proposal Submission & Approval

Once the proposals are submitted by the vendor, they are evaluated by the client for taking the decision. Within the organization, the proposal is evaluated for cost / time / resources Vs. Expected benefit. If it is a big proposal, then there will be some evaluation criteria for evaluating the new project. The criteria could be applied section-wise e.g. weightage for technical solution is 10%, schedule 20%, costing 30% and so on. Sometimes a team from each vendor, is asked to present the proposal to the client. It helps both the parties in getting their queries solved. Modified proposal is then resent for evaluation.

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Proposal Life Cycle (Contd.)

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Project Begins
Once the proposal is approved, the project begins. The proposal then becomes the starting document for project planning, technical architecture, QA planning and so on.

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Typical Proposal Contents

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Typical proposal looks like as given below. All the sections may not be present for each and every proposal

Typical Proposal