IT is viewed in many quarters as the engine of recovery from a long and lingering recession. With research showing
more companies spending on IT to rev up their business, drafting a successful proposal becomes a must for many IT professionals.
Think business, not IT Counterintuitively, the biggest error is to think of your proposal as an
IT proposal. To do so would make your proposal all about a technology, not a business solution..
Describe the problem to be solved More and more often, IT is being deployed in smaller, discrete chunks to meet a business need or solve a problem.
Perhaps the need is for a piece of technology that will improve a process and enhance customer service. Less frequently it may be a major IT technology upgrade required to stay viable as a business. Describe this kind of project in business terms. Either way, give factual evidence of how the proposed project will solve the problem.
Offer options You’ll need to have researched different scenarios and solutions to fix the problem or meet the need. The proposal should outline the costs, business benefits and business or technology risks of each. Make sure the figures stack up; otherwise the entire proposal will be immediately discredited. Always state your preferred option.
Less is more Many proposals fail because they are too wordy and the business audience loses interest or focus. Business people are too busy to read long proposals. The danger for tech professionals is to make the mistake of thinking the business is interested in reading about how technology works, or that if you miss the one point out, it will be the one that swings the argument your way.
Do an executive summary It’s a good way of keeping things concise and getting the main points of the proposal across. Always include a management summary of one page with your proposal, no matter how long or short the document. This can be presented in bullet points and should include the purpose of the project, the costs, measurement of success used and estimated business outcomes.
Make sure the sums add up
Busy IT departments that have lots of IT projects on the go often keep a financial analyst as a permanent part of the team. Their job is to make sure that the cost calculations are accurate for proposals and stay on track as projects progress. If you don’t have a financial analyst – this is your job!
With thanks to Dr Ben Booth, Chief Information Officer of research giant, Ipsos MORI
Search CWJobs for
management jobs and
1000s of IT vacancies
