Project Opportunity Finding — An approach that will bring more opportunities during this economical crisis for an organization
Prepared by: Dr. Parimalendu Bandhyopadhya
         H.O.D of Dept of Business administration (Bengal Engineering College, Durgapur) 
Prepared by: Joydeep Chowdhury	
                         Former Lecturer of Dept of Computer Application (B.B College, Asansol)

Introduction:

Project Opportunity Finding- a newest approach to find out opportunities from the existing clients or from the accounts. The software companies are specially adapting the Project Opportunity Finding approach. Project Opportunity Finding is an effective approach, which helps also to find the capabilities, the services and financial strength of the customer in the special services area. It is also effective for the IT companies to gain contracts or projects specially from existing client or the client from competitors in this economic slow down time.

This “Project Opportunity Finding” approach is highly acceptable by the clients because some time clients also doesn’t know the services and the requirements for their business, the best technology supports, the cost effective frame works services clearly. The “Project Opportunity Finding” also contains a complete lifecycle which us to start from finding the “Services Opportunities” in client business to the deployment of “Proposed opportunities” in customer environment. The second or third stage of this approach is contains the consultancy services for the customer. This also helps to build better relationship with the customers or clients.

Benefit of Project Opportunity Finding:

The benefits of "Project Opportunity Finding" can be depicted as---- "Getting more opportunities with less effort". The advantages of "Project Opportunity Finding" are:

•	In some critical economical situation (For e.g. the "Economical Crisis"  in 2001 and  2008-09) the "Project Opportunity Finding helps organization to find out opportunities for existing customer or other customer. Because this time customer or client use to retain the strength of their kitty and use to relies o their "Risk Management" strategies. Clients are use to throw less attention to the "Service Support", "Production Support" areas rather then their core "Services", "Production".

But co-incidentally these "Service Support", "Production Support” areas may helps to boost the core "Services and Production" which directly affect the client revenue. The venders use to find out these areas of opportunities where their service implementation will be helpful for clients. In these way the vender can understand the "Client Business" clearly and client can also understand the "Critical Crisis Point" and "Value Assurance Services" in their business.

One example will briefly elaborate the scenarios. One of the U.S giant "First Food" Producing company started to reduce it's investments for IT supports and Call Centers because of this recent economical crisis. But, still there was no remarkable sustainment in revenue. Their vender an IT and BPO company had done a survey and found out that------- " Most of the "First Food" customers does not want to wait for their order for long time, they want to spend that wasted time either in office or for their personal job purposes". Hence to improve the services of that "First Food" company, the vender suggested to implement some customer support centers where they can take the order when customer is going to park their car for restaurant by an "Auto Caller and Identification Machine". This approach affected and last quarter their revenue has grown 4.5% then previous quarter.

•	Project Opportunity Finding helps to find out and grooms some of the “Technical Service Providing” areas for vender. That technical areas may be not the biggest practice for the vender but still this kind of “Economical Crisis” time most of the clients or customer try to find out some “Small technical practice scale venders” who can provide necessary services with low cost along with quality assurance.

For the “Small technical practice scale venders”, they don’t have that renowned ness for their best technology practices. So, “Project Opportunity Finding” is the only way to find the opportunities and project the opportunities with the capability document to client.

•	The clients are use to relies on the existing venders and if venders are taking “Project Opportunity Finding” as approach to find out more opportunities, actually they will work as a “Technical Consultant” of client. In future they may be assigned or referred as “Technical Consultant”. 

•	Through “Project Opportunity Finding” one vender can measure its capabilities towards a specific “Technology Area”. After measuring the capabilities venders can implement these in their “Proposals”, “Capability Documents” and can do some changes in their “SOW/CR/RR.

•	“Project Opportunity Finding” not only provide the information about the client business but also it provide the information regarding the verticals and geographical distribution of business. This experience can be use in any of the related vertical and geographical distribution.

For example some of the Indian IT companies are started their business in Japan and Korea as the new emerging business geographical location. Their “Project Opportunity Finding” practice brought lots of opportunities at critical economical time. The IT companies successfully executed the projects because of their knowledge of verticals and geographical distribution of business.
Approach of Project Opportunity Finding:

Project Opportunity Finding is a cyclic concept and approach. It will run continuously. But there should continuous monitoring of the customer business, market, vertical, expansion, geographical expansion, culture, political impact, business leaders’ approaches, needs, requirements and competitors’ business, their technological practice and business support. The approaches can be describe in following steps:

                      	

1] Create template for Account Information: Create an template that will be contains some basic as well as some critical information about each account. The information will be as follows: 1) Name of the Account 2) Geographical Distribution of Customer Business 3) Industry Vertical 4) Present and past year revenue and profit 5) Present and past year IT expanses 6) Technology services provided by vender 7) Technology they badly needed 8)Technology they use to take services 9) Who is their competitors 10) What is the current portfolio tat vender has about the customer 11) What are their present step about recent economical crisis 12) Who are the main customer of the their product 13) What additional services or improvement they can implies 14) What are the domain support customer specifically require  15) What top level technology services other competitors of customer are following. 16) What is the relationship status with customer?
17) What is the relationship status of vender’s competitors with customer 18) Some basic account base information like number of resources providing support to customer. 19) Who are the controllers of the customer account in vender region? 20) Comparing customer approach with its competitors.

2] Collect Information for each account: Pass this template to controller of each account or some of the person who may provide the required information specified in template. Verify the information with the GRM or AM of that account.

3] Create a repository for each “Account base Information”: Create a common repository of these templates for each of the account where authorized people use to give some contributed data; rectify the invalid information with accurate data with proper reference. These verification will be a cyclic process and will be done time-to-time, may be everyday practice.

4] Verification of Information: Verify these information through each Account Manager, GRM, GM or high-level Account personnel: Once all the information has been collected, these all information will be verified by either AM,PM and GRM or by all of them. There may be some dedicated group to verify the information.

5] Use this template for “Project Opportunity Finding”: The final templates are given to the team, which is responsible for creating Project Opportunity Finding document. The team may be divided account wise, Business Unite wise, Vertical wise, Geographical distribution wise, Revenue wise or by other perspective wise.

6] Find out the service areas and the product sectors that Customer offered: Find out the services offered and the product development of the customer. It will help vender to understand the customer product and service life cycle. 

After understanding the life cycle vender can find out which step of this cycle require changes or require automation to survive and compete with current market trends. Each of the steps and automated system or support activities, ITES approaches, consulting activities should be compare with the competitors’ steps and support activities. This competitive difference, suggestion, consulting supports should be crystallize and documentaries. 

Suppose a retail customer contains some “Inventory Process” for their goods storage and transfer to depots. If the vender can understand the chain of process he advantages will be:

Vender can refer the success story to some other retail customer with the steps and automated system or support activities, ITES approaches, consulting activities.
The vender can study some stander process and refer that process to present customer.
Vender can find out the lop holes of customer’s process.

Vender can find out the exact step where customer requires automation, consulting or other supports.

7] Brief analysis of customer business: Study the “Customer Business, Technology Practice,Revenue-Profite,Geographical distribution, Competitors’ Detail etc. Brief analysis of Customer business contains brief analysis of some areas these are as follows:

What technologies they require to support the business?
Do they require any IT support?
Are these prescribed technological support going to fulfill customer requirements and support their kitty strength?
Are they using any technological or system based support and ITES support? 

For example if the customer is a retail client then the SAP,ORACLE APPS,JDE,LAWSON will be some prescribe able services.  Here customer can purchase the prescribe product and say vender to work on their environment or vender can create an application and host it in customer environment. If it is an financial customer then may require ECM support, if they are insurance client they may require “Data ware housing” support.

9] Analysis the technology services according to Customer need and economical capabilities: Analysis the technology services that customer require according to their kitty strength. The convenient practices is to create proposal about multiple technology supports according to 
•	Time frame, 
•	Cost effectiveness,
•	Robustness,
•	License availability, 
•	Partnership with some product base organization 
•	Easy to migration.

10] Find out Competitors’ practice about these technology and their success stories: Find out the competitor practice and their success stories to implement some technologies in particular stage of customer business. 

The better use is to create a “Prototype Module” and implement in an dummy environment of customer and test the response.

11] Create a “Capability Document” about the service provided by vender: After collecting the whole information about the customer summarize all the section and create an “Project Opportunity Finding Template” for that particular customer. Store this document to a common repository and do the verification.

12] If no capability practices are there, add reference to “Project Opportunity Finding”: If customer doesn’t have some technologies or practices that customer require at that instant vender may refer to some of its partner or well-known vender/service provider companies.
The benefit of this-----It will not only improve the relationship with customer but also the service provider whom the vender is going to refer. “In future the service provider whom you are referring may refer you for some projects”.

Conclusion:

Project Opportunity Finding is a new coming approach and now days most of the IT companies are started to relies on these approach. It will increase the values and relationship of ender to other customer. One common survey depicted that in such economical crisis “Project Opportunity Finding” has brought almost 15% more projects to the venders than other approaches like Goodwill of vender, Strong Proposal, Less Cost, Free Consulting and Reference etc. Overall the organizations those, which adopted “Project Opportunity Finding”, are still in gain and those, which started to follow this approach before 2008 have avoided the crisis situations. The following fig. shows that the companies which started to follow the “Project Opportunity Finding” made remarkable gain of 10-20% in current scenarios.

Fig 2: Some basic scenarios where the companies those who are following “Project Opportunity Finding” are in gain”

“Project Opportunity Finding” is not only an approach to find out the opportunities, it is also worth full because it use to give proper consulting to the customers. In today’s world this value-base relationship is getting more and more preference. The value-based relationship brings the partnership business opportunities for the customer, which customer fill more secure to execute a project. It will also help vender to do an agreement-based business. Today most of the vender are stated to adopt the “Project Opportunity Finding” approach and customaries it by their own business way. The day is not so far when the “Project Opportunity Finding” will one specialize way to measure and calculate the opportunities in customer business.

Reference:

We are really grateful to get the vast information Rajat Kalra (Sr. Executive of Sales) of USTGlobal, an leading IT company in India.
	
Other references:
•	Product marketing and sales force management and software

http://resources.bnet.com/topic/product+marketing+and+sales+force+management+and+software.html 

•	Software Marketing, Sales and Business Strategy
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•	Information technology Industry(Economy, Economics & Investing Reports):
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•	Yogesh Patil's Blog:http://ypat.blogspot.com/2008/05/best-and-easy-way-of-account-mining.html 
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•	India and the IT industry

           http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20090126/technologylife02.shtml 
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