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Friday, January 29, 2010

Writing a proposal to senior management

After a mind mapping exercise with a bunch of folks, we came up with the following order of things that we think are necessary for writing a good proposal to senior management.

1. Mission vs problem statement - If the problem is a well understood or a known issue then we can go after mission statement first followed by the problem statement. If not the order could be reversed.

2. Objective\goal\mission\problem statement

3. Solution or what we are going to do?

4. How does this idea fit the long term focus and vision of the company

5. Where are we going to market this?

6. What are the risks and their respective mitigation.

7. What are the competitor strategies and the approaches

8. What are the techniques\technology used to build

9. How many resources we need? What can be leveraged from the existing resources [Vendor companies involvement?]

10. What is the cost of implementation? ROI

11. Are there any proof of concepts? Product prototyping

12. What could be a likely schedule\dates?

13. Will there be any legal issues - say patents etc

14. Accountability

15. Product serviceability and road map - support too…

16. Pending risk.

References:
http://www.morebusiness.com/running_your_business/management/Drafting-Winning-Proposal.brc

http://contractscanada.gc.ca/en/writin-e.htm

http://www.nework.co.nz/SITE_Default/publications/articles/Writing_a_Proposal.asp

Sunday, January 24, 2010

What to look for in a cloud service offering?

A complete cloud service offering should touch up on the below topics:

Voice: Marketing team
Addressee: Large, mid, small sized companies + developers in the companies

1. Overview - What is cloud according to you?
(since cloud is very subjective)
a. Vision

2. What are the current offerings? -
a. Solutions that we currently have
b. Services - Exchange, SQL server, Forefront
c. What are the requirements? large\mid\small customers…

3. Benefits to the customers

4. Return of Investment - Alternatives, Competitive pricing, saving X$ over
a year etc

5. Availability - SLA, scalability etc..

6. Security -
a. Partner cloud,
b. moving data on and off of the cloud,
c. accessing data in the cloud
d. Legislation act

7. Pricing -
a. Cost per usage
b. Service usage
c. Usage reports and billing model

8. More information:
a. Pilot programs
b. Case studies
c. Demos \ Training modules
d. Implementation cycle

9. Support:
a. Developer support - code and platform
b. Help desk
c. How Tos? Blogs? Faqs\communities.

10. Strategy:
a. Roadmap
b. Future

Friday, January 15, 2010

My requests for the next version of Windows - Win8 ?

1. App compatibility - The major issue for any Windows release is that App developed for one OS is for the most part needs to be re-compiled with changes suited to the new OS. How can this be minimized?

Note: Current Win7 version is still 6.1 to support multiple apps...

2. Restarting machine for security updates - Ther has seen tremendous improvements from the past, however further minimizing reboot requirements for every patch will be a welcome improvement.

3. App virtualization - Simplifying app virtualization on Windows will give customers running app in different environments a peace of mind.

4. IE security holes - ActiveX usage for accessing Windows native code from IE posses potential risk areas, which needs to be fixed asap...If not Google will do it in it's efforts towards Google native APIs on Chrome.

5. UAC - User Access Control - How does a normal user know when to say "Yes" or "No" to install a software or not? Why not Windows decide on the fly with some sort of hashing to determine if the software to be run is a malware or genuine one?

Note: There was some sort of Windows tracker, similar to Apple's App store that channelizes all the installations and updates, not sure of the status though!