4.1. Managing business proposal resources

This topic is broken up into three sections: situation, business priorities, and solution. The first section, situation, will give a detailed explanation of a request that you’ve received. The next section, business priorities, will extract a list of requirements based on priority to accomplish your goals. It’s important when gathering information such as this to not mix technology with the requirements. Business process, not technology, should drive the requirements. The third section will give you an overview of the solution that we will spend the rest of the chapter walking through and building.

4.1.1. Situation

You are a resource manager for Durante Inc. You’re responsible for tracking employees, employees’ resumes, and the proposals they’re associated with. You’re often asked to provide information on the employees associated with a proposal. Currently this is a time-consuming task for you because you have the data dispersed and unassociated. The proposal team keeps the proposals on a file share. You manage the resumes by having the employees keep them up to date and send them via email to you if there are changes. You then store them in a folder in Outlook. When you are requested to provide their resumes for a proposal, you go the proposal file share, look up the resources listed, and then locate their resumes in your resumes folder in Outlook. You compile the data and send it to the requester. You’re certain there’s an easier and more efficient way to handle this data.