
Stop Writing Project Proposals - superchink
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/17/stop-writing-project-proposals/
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joelrunyon
I can't speak for development work, but for consulting work this is fantastic.

We completely turned my old business around using this. We went from fighting
to sign 3k/month retainer clients to signing multiple 8k, 10k, 12k and even a
17k month retainer using this strategy.

In my experience, the clients that don't like this arrangement are the ones
that end up being bad clients down the road anyways. The ones that do like
this, see the value in seeing an expert evaluation of the problem before
spending lots of money to fix something they haven't yet identified.

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MortenK
While a bit simplistic in the description of how much you can lock down scope
with an initial requirements document, the main point, which is to get paid
for an initial analysis and design phase, is incredibly important for small
consulting shops.

If you do not do this, you are merely rolling the dice every time you take on
a project, and the odds are not stacked in your favor!

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MicahWedemeyer
While I agree this is a great idea (as opposed to shooting-from-the-hip on
proposals), be careful of putting too much faith in the process. From the
article:

 _While how one calculates the price may vary, all the information is now
available to see the project through from start to finish, identifying the
challenges, and determining the amount of resources required to meet the
project’s objectives._

That sounds like an old fashioned waterfall fantasy to me. I know it's not
true, but I'm afraid clients would believe it.

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rpwilcox
I always say something like, "here is your project evaluation, based the
current desires/spec for your project. Certainly things can be add, removed,
re-prioritized. When work begins this should be seen as a living document that
grows and evolves with the project."

The initial evaluation will help you fill out your client's backlog, and also
understand how many people (with what skillets) you need on the project.

So, think of it as getting paid to do Agile Project Manager work. At least how
I see it. :-)

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ricardobeat
Interesting take. Isn't that, in practice, the same as just refusing to enter
non-paid competition and taking an advancement for every project? The work put
into the "evaluation" sounds like information architecture + tech specs +
development planning, which would normally answer for 30-50% of a project's
cost. I wonder if marketing this phase as an independent package makes a
difference in sales, as he appears to suggest?

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joelrunyon
It makes things a lot easier in a way for both ends. You're not tied long-term
to a client that could potentially be a nightmare. You get to evaluate the
project and give them a realistic view of what work comes next. You can also
(and should occasionally) turn down the job, if the evaluation reveals they're
not a good fit for your services.

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waiwai933
Forgive me if I've misread the article, but isn't the Project Evaluation
essentially just a spec, with the option to actually implement the spec or
not?

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einhverfr
I think the difference is that a proposal is "here's how I would implement
your requirements as documented" while an evaluation is a bit more than that.
It's "Here's what problems you are having. Here's what you say you need.
Here's what we think you need." and maybe "Here are a few ways we could go
about helping you."

The goal is not to just deliver a proposal based on an incomplete spec, but
rather to help the customer understand their problems better.

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corry
This is a great idea when dealing with small clients. The big challenge,
however, is that the majority of the organizations that rely on RFP (e.g.
public sector or enterprise buyers) do so because they HAVE TO for policy /
political reasons. It's not only about selecting the best vendor.

The RFP process optimizes for "not making a bad choice" vs "making the best
choice", and is usually also done for transparency / accountability reasons as
well.

We're building a new type of eSourcing tool to help make the RFx process
faster and more streamlined for vendors / buyers / evaluators, so we've been
digging deep into 'structured buying'. It's a lot more complicated than "this
process sucks, let's change it".

In our opinion, the problem isn't the process itself (which is necessary for
public sector and enterprise) but in how the process is conducted - i.e. the
lack of communication, slow decisions, ill-defined evaluation criteria, etc.

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raganwald
I can speak to this. Many large clients have the ability to hand out small
evaluation projects without competitive bidding. So, they can hire you to do a
10K or whatever evaluation but are required to put the resulting 100K
implementation through an RFQ process.

The eye-opener for me quite some years back was discovering that most of the
RFPs we saw were the result of an evaluation like the one described, we were
being asked to quote, blind, against the firm that had been paid to write the
RFQ in the first place.

One tl;dr of this article could be, "Stop responding to RFPs written by your
competition and look for opportunities to write the RFPs yourself."

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delibaltas
I had the same thought ten years ago. I think this is the best way to work. It
was never accepted by the clients though.

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Duff
Sounds great, but proceed with caution. Where I work, you would be deemed
"non-responsive".

