IT Services Bid Management Enabling Framework

IT Services Big Management Enabling Framework

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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The Dying Captives

The Economic times article quotes a Forrester study that 15% of MNC's Captives are looking for an exit strategy.

I can only say, " I told you so". I can only say that MNC's need to realize that captives in India are not to be treated under cost+ model only (which is cost of salary, infrastructure and 10% more), it creates a system where the security of Jobs shifts the focus from value creation and excitement to maintaining the status-quo.

This is by far the main reason. MNCs need to create partnerships models with the captives and let captives create their own businesses.

Control freaks will not be able to maintain captives as captives in the long run!

3rd Gen Outsourcing Model

3rd Generation IT Outsourcing Model

This term seems to have been coined by General Motors (GM), when GM moved from EDS as a single-source IT supplier, to the new model of dividing the whole IT chunk into smaller more manageable units to be executed by different vendors – the so called multi-sourcing scenario.

The challenge lies in following areas in this so called 3rd Gen Model:

The coordinator of the multi-sourced IT vendors, who also happens to be one of them
The end-to-end ownership of specific applications (development, performance and maintenance) – with the client washing-off their hands from it

Another important reason is the increasing concern and in fact demand from the business (read CEO) is how to create alignment of IT with business. In the earlier generations this was missed. IT Value measurement and alignment with business is the reason for trying to define the alignment as clearly as possible. I think the key of the 3rd Gen Outsourcing is IT alignment with Business Objectives where vendor works cohesively with the client and other outsourcing vendors in clearly aligning IT with business objectives.