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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Engineering Degree and Science Graduates - They are same for IT Outsurcing services

There was a time when B.Tech or B.E. degree was indeed the minimum to really get into core of Computer Science and Information Technology Jobs. Slowly, we had more wider education degree holders e.g. Master in Computer Applications (MCA) also joining in the IT Jobs. Then there are specific IT jobs where commerce and accounting functions need to be automated. Here B.Com, M.Com graduates with IT application training started getting IT Jobs. Now a days we are seeing multiple functional stream graduates working with technology graduates to create end value.

However a sweeping statement as made here by an IT Outsourcing Giant and the drivers for such action needs to be studied little deeply. The article here quotes Premji of Wipro as saying,

"Most of the engineering students can perform as well as an engineer after one year of [on the job] training. They are the cream of the crop and highly motivated," said Premji. "

To me this can be explained in two ways either the engineering education is really not sufficiently different or the work that IT services organization are really doing doesnt really demand engineering degrees. I suspect the reason is closer to the latter. If that is the case, then would not it be better to take the existing engineering gradutates to a higher plane by giving them more challenging work - say a new product design - rather than counting billing rates dollars per hours for fixing field bugs of applications running out there or having to test the badly written computer codes through so-called six sigma processes and making labour factories of software development.

Interesting is the driver for such initiatives as quoted by the article, To keep a lid on wages, Wipro is decreasing the number of engineering graduates it hires in favor of students with a general four-year science degree. Science graduates in India typically command salaries at a level about half of the $750 per month of engineering grads, he said. (This is attributed to the HR)

The defence of such action is below, "They are smart people but could not afford an engineering degree or wanted to graduate in less than four years," he added. "At half the costs of an engineer, this creates an extremely powerful model. Our customers often don't care if we bring in an engineer or non engineer as long as they are trained and smart," he said.

One reason that is missed out is that they could not qualify for an engineering degree admission test which is quite tough in India.

Mind you, I have absolutely no problems with Science graduates becoming IT Honchos - I really am for this inclusion. What really is disturbing is the under utilization of Engineering graduates - they are being converted quickly to Managers by such initiatives.

In the long-run IT and ITES revolution in India may be doing more harm to Engineering, Science and Technology creation capability of the Nation?