Value-Addition: A New Perspective!

Value Addition - A new Perspective!

For about a week now, I'd been working on estimating for a proposal. Since we are IT Services Company, our buzzword is "Value Addition".

Until this time, I always used to feel that it is just a management jargon thrown in to add weight to our work. For the first time, I actually got a glimpse into what that is.

For example, we as Technical guys are always caught up with the task at hand and we never look at the bigger picture. In our case, for two days, our team was reading and re-reading the requirements document and to ensure that we understood the system. Then, in the evening, we were discussing with our Center Head about the proposal.

He said, "The system has so many customers. Assuming they pay an X amount, the company uses Y part of it for the salary and Z part for the infrastructure; they make a profit of (X-Y-Z) dollars. Our proposed system is costing ABC dollars. Would our client want to replace the existing system or is the new solution feasible?"

Somehow, none of us in the development team had ever pondered on this question. It was truly amazing that the he managed to ask this question when he'd not even read any of the client proposal documents!

Apart from this, I had to work with the Business Analysts. Their point of view was entirely different from all others. They were going through each and every client instruction like Holy Grail! The print-out of client instruction document was completely filled with underlines totally highlighted.

They were also responsible for the planning of the resources for the project. That is, how do we get the people to the project, as it moves in the SDLC and also, ensuring that the people are kept occupied. Based on the effort estimations that we'd given, they had to come up with a plan about how the people will be pulled into the new project, used effectively and moved out when their role ended.

Apart from all this, the main motto at every point in time was the principle, "What is it that we are doing that adds value to the client?" For example, we made a simple requirement document from the one that the client had provided. All we did was to arrange it into modules so that it was easier to read and modular. The suggestion was, "Whatever we've done is just copy paste. What can we add value to this document?" So, we created a section detailing the gaps in requirements, our observations and suggestions. From a mundane document, we turned it around to be a really insightful one for the client.

One thing that I realized was proposal is a very hectic activity. Event though it involves just going through the client documents, the effort that we put in to understand the system, to find areas for improvements and then presenting it in an attractive, yet affordable manner; all this was a real eye-opener for me. Hope all our effort does not go waste and we manage to win the bid!