This best-practices framework is designed to help managers develop successful IT services proposals in today's challenging and highly competitive globalized environment.
Over the past few years, outsourcing of IT services has steadily increased across the globe. Outsourcing is attractive because it lets companies save costs, focus on core competencies, gain access to specialized expertise, increase profits, and tackle competitive pressures.From the IT service providers' perspective, this outsourcing wave has created substantial potential for growth. With it, however, come the challenges of responding to an increasing number of large, complex opportunities under stringent deadlines. Managers thus need specialized skills for managing proposal development, including the ability to quickly grasp the big picture, work with fairly ambiguous problem statements, operate under rigorous time and resource constraints, and proficiently lead cross-functional and geographically distributed teams. 1 With this article, I examine the skills and abilities that a proposal manager needs and present a framework that can help steer such proposal efforts to success. Under each of the framework's six dimensions, I provide several best practices that are based on my own experiences, interactions with other proposal managers, and published industry best practices.
Proposal Management FundamentalsTo effectively respond to IT services requests for proposals (RFPs), the proposal manager must proficiently run the proposal-development 46 IT Pro July/August 2008 P u b l i s h e d b y t h e I E E E C o m p u t e r S o c i e t y 1520-9202/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE OutsOurcing © iloveotto | Dreamstime.com
