Documentation Standards

Project Bid Document

In this document:

• Audience and Goals of Project Bid
• Tone of Project Bid
• Project Bid Contents
• Considerations for assigning projects to teams

Related information

• Bids from earlier semesters at Texas to use as samples.

Audience and goals of Project Bid Document

The Project Bid Document has as its primary audience the customers of the proposal and the instructor.

The Project Bid Document has several goals:

• to present the projects with which the team would like to work
• to illustrate why the team is qualified to work on each of the projects
• to describe the proposed approach to each of the proposed projects

Tone of Project Bid

The project bid should be factual and straightforward. It is fine to have some fun, but not at the expense of presenting a clear discussion. It is vital that the content of the bid be balanced between providing too much and too little information. Too much information means the team has probably expended too much time and energy on the bid document. Too little information means that the CEO and VPs have too little information to fairly assess the team's bid document. It is important to keep the content of the bid for each project brief, yet imaginative and complete.

---

Project Bid Contents

Include bids for 2 or 3 different projects. Each bid should have a separate document and the document should contain the following sections:

1.0 Project preferences
   
       The first row should have the names of the team members and the second row should give each member's rating of the project. 
       The rightmost column should be labeled "Total."

       To fill in the table cells, each team member gives a value from 0 to 10.
       More desirable projects receive a higher number of points.

       

	Annie	Boris	Cathy	Donald	Edith	Frank	Total
RevU	8	5	5	8	1	9	36

   

2.0 Qualifications and tradeoffs
   2.1 Strengths and qualifications
       Discuss the team's strengths and qualifications for the
       project listed in section 1.  

   2.2 Trade-offs, constraints, and special considerations
       Discuss any trade-offs, constraints, or special considerations
       that should be weighed in assigning your team one of the
       projects.

3.0 Project name (Client, location)
   3.1 Approach
       Discuss briefly the approach your team visualizes for this
       project.  If you wish, you may include screen sketches, 
       suggested layouts, or graphics, although the team should
       not invest too much energy into developing such aspects.     
   3.2 Implementation considerations
       Conclude this short section by discussing any implementation
       considerations for this project.  (Note: The vision of each
       project is likely to change once the team speaks to 
       the client, so do not become too attached to a particular
       approach!!)

  

Considerations for Assigning Projects to Teams

An ideal matching of teams to projects would assign every team to their top choice project. This ideal situation is unlikely to occur. Each semester, a subset of projects attract a majority of bids. Since clients are rarely able to work with multiple teams on a single project, a number of teams will not receive their first-choice bids. It is very important that teams give even attention to all of the bid options they submit, rather than concentrating major efforts on their top choice bids.

When multiple teams have the same first choice, these additional factors come into play:

• the full set of project choices for each team
• the content of the teams' bid documents
• the customer's desires
  
• the ambition of matching as many clients as possible with a team for at least one of their projects
• the overall balance of bids across each project

The algorithm that the CEO and VPs use to assign projects to teams is an iterative process that strives to fulfill all of the factors simlutaneously.