Learning Launch Application – Proposal Management

Challenge

I am part of Insurance Business Unit (BUs) business development / proposals management team for  operations/services of a repute organization. Similarly there are other 4 BUs managing their own business  development / proposals teams separately and working in silos. Each team consists of around 12 – 15  members doing multiple activities. All teams support their respective sales teams and in turn work with  other downstream teams for all the proposal inputs. Recently due to increasing demand from corporate  for better sales & support and at reduced cost led to this team re-structuring project exercise. The project  objective was to create a new Ways of working by re-structuring the overall teams to reduce overall  support cost and enhance the sales & support.  One base hypotheses to start was that ~60% – 70% overlap  work between the teams hence the overall structure & cost can be optimized to that extent. We have key  stakeholders in terms of 30 sales leads and 50 downstream leads.

Selection

We constituted a team of 10 with involvement from each BU and corporate. We agreed on the common  project scope with defined timeline of 12 weeks to propose the detailed findings to the leadership for  implementation. We wanted to test a Shared Service Business development model.

Corporate ensured that all the team members goes through the design thinking process and tools  trainings. We agreed to proceed with Learning Launch tool to experiment with Shared Service model idea  for couple of proposals to derive the percentage optimization possibility and sales / proposal development  enhancement / faster.

Application

We conducted brief surveys with all the involved stakeholders. The team then shared their respective BUs  business development ways of working and best practices. The surveys included process understanding,  deliverables expectation, new model point of view and challenges. We documented all the details and  with some mapping of addressing common activities, categorization of standards & customized activities  and suggested additional requirements.

We then agreed on a common ways of model working and run for one proposal for each of the BUs. We  delivered the proposals within 6 weeks. We again conducted a brief surveys with all key stakeholders on  new model and the deliverables quality & timeliness. We discussed our own experiences, key learnings  and documented.

We then analyzed our proposal response time taken, utilization of resources and quality.

Insights

Our analysis from AS IS ways of working, TO BE ways of working and stakeholders feedback from  expectations and new mode experiment gave us some interesting new insights other than the hypotheses  we started.

To address our primary hypotheses, our result shows that ~70% activities are common / standards across  the BUs but in new model environment we were able to achieve only ~30% - 35% optimization  leveraging  same tools & applications.  One of the reason for this difference is BU-wise stakeholder working in silos  with different expectation with no common platform / applications.

To address the difference a new ideas also evolved – introducing a common digital (mobile enabled)  sharepoint with standard ways of working / content / best practices for easy access.

So we are now scaling the Shared Services model in phases and optimizing our teams.

Approach

Our next project is to test proposal management integrating with the Shared Service model. The primary  hypotheses will be it will further optimize the effort and led to enhance sales and other stakeholders’  experience. We plan to leverage combination of design thinking tools of Learning Launch and Visualization  to test the tool and overall model. Visualization will be effective in creating how the tools GUI and  interface with stakeholder while Learning Launch can be used to test the overall model experiment with  the sales.

