A new job and a pandemic, well this has been my story so far. A recent graduate from Pune University, I was really happy when I was offered a role at a leading IT firm in Pune. Personally, there was no problem for me in transitioning from working at a proper workplace to a work from home situation as I only got to visit the office for a week before the lockdown. Soon I realized the advantages of working in an IT firm, the infrastructure set up to support employees to work from any remote location is commendable. My friends who started at various organizations that worked in retail and manufacturing were affected hard and had to stop their work completely. In comparison I was quite contented with my work situation.
As time passed, I started understanding my role in the team better. I am a part of a team that scans for development and support services opportunities in the International organizations. My role was to support the team in various tasks and try to learn how various business processes are carried out. The major part of our team’s work is to design the proposal as per the requirements of the organization. Every proposal has different solutions and suggestions that could help our company showcase competency in that particular technology or field.
Every proposal has to be completely organized with clear solutions and feasible ideas to actually win the project. The company profile is one such part of the proposal
The major points that should be accommodated in company profile should be –
- Accreditation
- Company values
- Company’s past projects
- Company’s resource pool and associated competencies
As I worked with the team and researched on how different companies approach the RFPs (Request for Proposal), I observed that each company has a different approach. One such example was of MBB (McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Bain & Company), yes, they are not focused completely into IT consulting but still some of their projects and services are in the mix of the services that we provide as well. I learnt through some posts on Reddit, posted by consultants working at these firms about how they approach this RFPs, not the IP info obviously but the thought process that they apply.
See the proposals at these firms are mostly boilerplate, the major differentiators are the consultant’s proposed solution and the past projects that he/she has worked on. The decks are made by the consultants themselves and the presentation is their own responsibility unless you are a partner at the firm, if yes then most of the work is handled by the analysts in your teams. Now this was the part that described how the proposals were designed, the major points that were common with the successful proposals was the accommodation of the consultant’s competencies and the resources (Supporting Analysts) he/she has to his reserve.
Creating an analogy from this, I understood and started getting the approach and the major inclusion points in a proposal. From a perspective of a management student it is similar to a pitch a salesman makes to promote his company’s services/product, but with a proposal it becomes a form of written communication where the proposer can clearly indicate his/her company’s services and solutions for the client.
The intent of this blog is to showcase the job role and my observations regarding it. The future business scenarios are surely going to change, bringing in new methods of doing business. What we all, especially the new entrants, must do is have an open mind to learn and adapt to the changing models and help our organizations transform their methodologies to excel in the New Normal.
I hope everyone reading this is safe and secure, may we all ride this tsunami and come out even stronger than before.
Cheers!
