Abstract
Changing requirements and on-going decision making along the entire project life cycle are well handled by Agile methods. However Agile projects still use evaluation methods during the RFP stage that do not fulfill the flexibility mandated by the Agile manifesto.
Current evaluation methods assume a single development alternative, and thus a fixed cost–benefit tradeoff. The proposed model provides a more realistic approach by relaxing this assumption. It assumes that a supplier can propose several different alternatives (Multi-Alternative Proposal) reflecting diverse potential cost-benefit tradeoffs. The model makes it possible to rank the suppliers of these Multi-Alternative Proposals at the RFP stage.
The ideas behind the method combine concepts from both the Agile approach and Data Mining. Thus suppliers who provide multi-alternative proposals can be ranked in an objective, but very intuitive manner.
1. Introduction
Request for proposals (RFP) and proposal analysis are significant milestones in information technology (IT) projects, regardless of the management and development approaches that are implemented. In current tender procedures, suppliers are required to submit their proposals according to predefined specifications. These specifications explicitly ask bidders to state system requirements, timetables and deliverables. The latter usually define intermediate milestones for system subproducts. The participants present their proposals in detail, covering both quality related items (i.e., the functional aspects) as well as cost related issues (i.e., budgetary issues) in what is supposed to be a clear and unequivocal format.
4. Discussion and future work
Uncertainty, changing requirements and on-going decision making along the entire IT project period are well-known concepts in Agile methods. Nevertheless, when it comes to the RFP stage, Agile projects use evaluation methods that do not take the uncertainty of cost-benefit tradeoffs into account. Instead (and similar to 'traditional' approaches) they assume that the cost-benefit weight (w) is known at the RFP stage. We argue that this assumption runs counter the Agile manifesto, and present a simple method which overcomes this difficulty by relaxing this assumption. The method proposed here is both objective and consistent with the Agile approach.
