Proposal Design Workshop

Who is this for?

• Project managers who want to create a proposal involving a team

Project Goals

• Understand the needs, requirements, constraints and budget of a client

• Evaluate how an internal team can create deliverables within the provided constraints and budget

• Create a realistic proposal including recommendations to the client for future work

Hazards

• Team might not want to work together under provided conditions

• Payment may not be fair

• Team might feel like it was a waste of time

Process

Prepare the session

Invite participants to the workshop:

Client: People from the team that's already working actively on that problem; Decision maker (or direct connection to them).

DW: PM; Outreach coordinator; Experts that could be a fit for the project.

HMW Session

In this 30-minute workshop session, participants discuss what they want to accomplish and identify the biggest challenges.

Experts ask the client targeted questions to help identify key information.

Important: The client needs to clearly communicate the total available budget for the work.

Prioritize HMWs

Together with the client, prioritize the HMWs to identify the most urgent challenges. After this step, the client can leave the workshop.

Solutions - Generate & Prioritize

Experts brainstorm solutions to match their capabilities with the client's problems. By voting on them together, the team identifies the best, considering the budget.

Additionally, they can discuss the viability of the solutions and segment them through a venn-diagram of needs and constraints.

They also determine which solutions require deeper paid work and which can be done by the client. The experts generate expert advice, which may be asynchronous, and include their suggestions as a bonus in the proposal.

Delegate

In case a more detailed breakdown of the solutions is not necessary, every expert should place their name on a solution to signal interest in working on it.

Define the cost for tasks

Make sure the team is happy with their individual payments. You can also use a workshop exercise to split the payments upfront, see Review Payments.

Create the proposal

Create a proposal based on the information above, feel free to use any of the existing proposal templates in Notion.

Include the expert’s suggestions as a bonus in the proposal (from the solutions step above).