RFPdesk - A Tracking and Management Tool
Throughout the course of my Experience designer journey, I have worked on multiple RFPs (Request for Proposals) and each time I have felt the need for it to be managed better. One of my seniors asked me if I can take this up as a project and try finding a solution for managing RFPs better. Thus began this journey.
This is a study that analyzes the current RFP Management and Tracking system in the organization, its pain points and areas of improvement to build a better solution for optimizing the processes. his idea was pitched to the senior leadership and received great feedback for implementing it.
My Role
Researcher
User Experience Designer
Visual Designer
Design Team
Poornima Parvathy
Sneha
Time and Process
4 months
Service Design Process
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The Process
Since the focus here is on improving the experience of RFP
Process and optimising it, which in turn improves the customer
journey, the route of service design was chosen.
(a picture from NN group is mentioned below on the left to depict what is Service design
The right-side flowchart shows the process I custom made for this project.)
Problem Discovery
There is no standard, centralized system that is currently
followed to track and manage RFPs.
The tracking currently is manual, and the document mostly is an excel sheet, resides with one or two members.
Manually following the process is time consuming and requires
more efforts.
There is a lack of a proper case study repository that will
potentially be useful for reference. Lot of data is lost in the process.
I can't find the
excel sheet
where I was tracking
the past RFPs.
Solution
User Groups
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Design Leadership - Associate Directors
Design Leads - Managers
and Senior Managers
Any member who is working on the RFP
User Journey
Both Leadership's and team members' journeys were documented in different ways. As the journey maps are too much in detail about the company systems, portals, processes, it can't be shared here due to the confidentiality.
Empathy Mapping
Once the Personas were defined and interviews were done, Empathy mapping was done for team members and Leadership.
Leadership's
Team Member's
Service Design Blueprint
After a careful review of all the information from the User Research steps, I wanted a route to synthesize all the information to get a meaningful analysis. Since all the teams work in parallel and I am working on optimizing that process, all the information was mapped as a blueprint - through which I got a redefined problem statement.
Mapping Pain points and Value Additions
From the initial research, the exact pain points were mapped, and potential value adds were brainstormed to solve the pain points.
Redefining Problem Statement
Design
Brainstorming ideas and then coming up with a list of low fidelity wireframes, on paper then on screen
(Keep sliding through the images)
Wireframes
These wireframes show the screens from Leadership perspective and these reflect how the
final product will look like.
1. A dashboard with Projects page to reflect the summarized data of the projects, teams, activities over the past months. 2. A trend chart of no. of projects 3. The side menu containing all the details related to the RFP - Projects, Analytics, Learnings, Member details and more.
This feature was added in MVP stage, to add an RFP to the list. If it is technically possible to auto populate the dashboard without having to fill in details, that will be implemented in the future.
This page shows the list of members, their experience in particular domain as well as their past work history. Members can be assigned to a project as well. As members, they can even request to work on an RFP - giving the leadership an opportunity to ease of resource allocation.
1. A dashboard with Projects page to reflect the summarized data of the projects, teams, activities over the past months. 2. A trend chart of no. of projects 3. The side menu containing all the details related to the RFP - Projects, Analytics, Learnings, Member details and more.
Challenges
- To what extent data can be fetched from X Portal (the portal where RFP details are stored by accounts team)?
- For this solution to work in its full potential, the history of RFPs, its details and the repository needs to be created - which is a cumbersome task.
- It is going to be a new system for everyone, and members might take time to get accustomed to enter the details, and deal mainly through the app.
- Confidentiality issues of certain RFPs need to be kept in mind.