Project Brief
Working within the mobility realm, where municipalities and universities are the primary clients, the proposal process is often the only way to secure new business. With that, every Request for Information (RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP) can be drastically different, each with its own set of qualifications based on the client, the desired product, or the known competition at the time. With a short timeline, these projects are particularly challenging as there are a number of internal and external stakeholders that must be wrangled to produce quickly.
Applicable Projects
- University of South Florida – Bike Share Equipment RFP – May 2014
- City of St. Petersburg – Bike Share RFI – March 2015
- City of St. Petersburg – Bike Share Equipment and Operations RFP – October 2015
Initiating Phase
Within the initiating phase of proposal project management, the project charter is a given item by the client, and the focus is on identifying stakeholders. With the three projects outlined, stakeholders included the CEO, CFO, COO, and two additional internal departments, as well as many outside vendors such as equipment providers, engineers, planners, and graphic designers.
Planning Phase
While the stakeholders and execution process varies from proposal to proposal, the planning phase is relatively uniform. As the project manager on these proposals, attention was put on planning schedules and aligning stakeholders. With local market knowledge, I spent time in this phase working with corporate office urban planners on risk management to determine the scope of our proposal. Scope, in this case, is the number of bikes we would aim to deploy beginning operations.
Executing Phase
As project manager on these proposal responses, this was by far the most challenging phase, limited to seven to ten business days. With experience in implementing bike share operations, I learned to help push the project along by drafting copy where possible enabling stakeholders to act more as expert consultants later in the process. Throughout these three projects, I also learned to budget for schedule contingency as any number of unforeseen challenges can accompany stakeholder management with tight timelines.
Outcome
Every RFI and RFP I wrote was successful during this timeframe, resulting in equipment sales contracts worth more than $2,000,000 and one operations contract.
Two years following the sale of equipment to the University of South Florida – Tampa (USF), in 2017, I also negotiated the contract to take over operations previously run by the school. The agreement came with a considerable increase in revenue and added more value to students, opening up their ability to use systems in two neighboring cities, each with USF campuses.
