Bidding for Information Technology Services or Information Technology enabled Services (The IT/ITeS) is a highly context sensitive activity fraught with many uncertainties and impacted by multiple imponderables. Managing an IT/ITeS bid involves multiple stakeholders and skills. The aim of dedicated bid managers is typically to carry out high number of bids in a specific time period and increase the win/bid ratio. However, due to increasing number of bids and the amount of information needed from multiple experts or stakeholders to organize a response for a bid, it is a challenge for the bid manager to organize high quality response to the customer needs in the compressed time lines that invariably creeps in despite the best intentions. This impacts the overall quality of the bid response and in fact impacts the win-bid ratio to a considerable extent. There is a need to ease the task of bid managers to generate responses to a large number of bids where each bid has its specific peculiarities and each bid may require multiple mix and match of existing services that the IT services company provides.
Crafitti was involved in working with a large Indian IT/ITeS Company to improve the effectiveness of the Bid Management system. During the initial interactions with the Bid management team in the Telecom Services Provider (TSP) vertical specific pain areas were articulated by the team. It was decided to use the Innovation Crafting Framework for solving the pain areas. This framework propels the team to take a holistic approach by taking the problem through clearly distinct phases of –
(I) Problem Formulation/Exploration/Definition
(II) Ideation/Solution Generation/Brainstorming
(III) Solution Development
(IV) Solution Evaluation
(V) Solution Implementation
(VI) Monitoring of Benefits.
Each of these phases require half-day workshop with almost half day of offline work by the teams per week for over 5-6 weeks as the case may be. This report describes the complete process and also documents the key solutions and improvements created using the Innovation Crafting by designing a new Bid Management Enabling Framework.
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