Request For Proposals To Provide Implementation Support To: Fill & Download for Free

Early in my web development career I realized that there were three things that were critical for every non-programmer to know before interacting with programmers in a professional setting.My experience building a single feature with a non-technical product manager taught me these lessons almost immediately.Let me explain...I was working with Colin, a non-technical product manager, who was responsible for driving the direction of the product and working with my team, the development team, to implement features for our product.As a developer, Colin was great to work with. The feature requests he created were always really well thought out. He always had all the edge cases accounted for and he drew detailed wireframes, diagrams of what the expected behavior of the feature should look like.But then, all of a sudden, Colin had a feature request for our team that caused a major problem for our entire development team!Colin gave our team a wireframe diagram of our application that had an additional checkbox that would allow a user to store their credit card information on the platform.The feature request seemed simple enough, but because of laws and regulations about credit card information (specifically PCI compliance laws), storage of credit card information is something that is highly complex and regulated.Despite seeming simple, supporting this one feature in our application would require a complete rewrite of our code.I brought this issue up to Colin, and at first he didn’t get it.All I’m asking for is a simple checkbox, it can’t be that difficult to add.He said. I explained that adding the checkbox would be super easy, but making the checkbox do what it claimed would be the difficult part.Colin then did something that proved that he was the type of product manager who got things done. He explained:Let me explain why I wanted to include the ability to allow a user to save their payment information...And then Colin explained that after making a certain type of purchase, it was very common for users to make a related purchase shortly after.Together we realized there was a solution where we could prompt the user to purchase both items at the same time, instead of worrying about storing the payment information. This was a solution that would give Colin everything he wanted and be over 10x easier to implement for our team.Together with Colin, we implemented this solution. This experience taught me that there are only three things that non-programmers need to focus on when working together with other developers.They’re also easy lessons to learn...1. Communicate the technical details to developers quickly and efficiently.There is no more effective way to explain functionality of an application than showing a developer wireframes of proposed changes.2. Things can appear to be easier to implement than they actually are.Be open to the idea that things that seem like they should be really easy can be much more difficult to implement in practice.3. Provide context about why you think things are important.Explain the why behind the thoughts you have in situations where you’re getting pushback from developers — if you do this you’ll find yourself working together with them to solve problems.Remember that you are have the same end goal as the developers you’re working with — to provide the best experience possible or the application you’re building.Follow these steps and the developers you’re working with can focus their energy on being the best developer they can be. And if you’re a developer you can focus on the 29 Behaviors That Will Make You An Unstoppable Programmer.If you thought my answer was helpful, it would mean a lot to me if you could press the light blue upvote button below.

It is absolutely not an easy job. I was a professor at two large public universities one of which is a Carnegie Level 1 Research Institution (the highest level) and is annually ranked among the top 5 public universities and among the top 20 public and private universities in the USA and my wife taught at a large community college, so I have seen a broad spectrum of college teaching situations. In my experience as a professor for 25 years at research universities, I found that it is an extremely demanding and stressful job (even after tenure). I usually taught 2 classes a semester, supervised a research group of graduate students and a post-doc, wrote research papers for publication, gave presentations at professional conferences, wrote proposals for research funding, organized the logistics for and was chief scientist and expedition leader during Research expeditions to the seas around Antarctica, the western Pacific, Gulf of Mexico, Appalachian Mountains and Rocky Mountains, taught field courses in remote locations, was responsible for managing the financial accounts and making sure that multiple people were paid their salaries.I summarize it as saying that professors have the following jobs (with 2 to 3 of them consuming the equivalent of a half-time job or more at the same time), rather than the professor having just one job:During any semester I did most of the jobs listed below:Teacher,Scientist- Formulate new research questions and convert these into testable hypotheses, design experiments to generate data to test hypotheses, write proposals to obtain funding to actually conduct the experiments, conduct the experiments and collect data in the field and/or lab, analyze the data, report results of experiments orally at conferences and in written form via reports to funding agencies and professional papers published in peer-reviewed journals, repeatProfessional Writer,Editor- Serve as reviewer of manuscripts for various professional societies as well as review research proposals for various government and public funding agencies,Professional Public SpeakerLogistics Expert -Procure equipment and supplies for field and lab research, organize freight transfer by ship, truck, train, ship and air of research equipment and personnel to field research sites, handle complicated customs paperwork associated with shipping equipment,Manager and Mentor of people,Entrepreneur and Salesman- Procure research funding for field, lab and equipment expenses by writing proposals to grant agencies and corporations and recruiting new students,Admssions Officer - Annually review graduate applicationsAdministrator- Serve on a wide range of Department and University Committees.In addition to being woefully underpaid for the level of effort, time and expertise that is required to perform all of these tasks successfully, my colleagues and I also endured the insult of having our Masters graduates immediately take jobs that paid them 2 to 3 times as much per year in salary as we were paid for our decades worth of experience and knowledge. We are quite happy that are students are compensated well for their work and knowledge, but it is distressing that the public does not value the work that we do for the state. Our children do not even get a discount to attend the states public higher education institutions, so you would think that we would be compensated so that we could afford to send our children to college without having to take out loans. I enjoyed the job, but grew resentful of these inequities as anti-intellectualism grew in recent years and I experienced a decline in respect for authority and professors.I understand that the public is unhappy about the growing cost of tuition and education, but faculty are not the cause of this. Increasing cost cost are driven by universities feeling that they need to provide all types of unnecessary amenities and luxuries on campus in order to compete with peers for students. Fancy gyms, gourmet-style dining options and new student union building etc. are not critical to university function, but they are being implemented and are very expensive. During this same time period, the public has grown more selfish and is only willing to pay for items that they feel will benefit them directly and personally. Altruistic ideas like paying higher taxes so that our society benefits from having well-educated populace is unpopular. Consequently, there has been a steady decline in the amount of funding provided by state legislatures to fund higher education.At the same time, funds from another important revenue source for universities have also declined. The public and most students do not know that a huge proportion of the budget of many universities comes from the overhead that is paid to universities to support research grants. Unfortunately, there has been steady erosion in the size of the budgets of the various federal research funding agencies that are the sources of this research overhead. The reduction occurred as the cost of living increased and budgets did not keep pace and in some instances because of outright budget reductions. As a simple example of how this money gets to universities, a faculty member writes a proposal to a funding agency and earns a grant that requires $100,000 to complete the research, the faculty member must add between an additional 40 and 70% of that %100,000 to the budget of that grant proposal to cover the cost of access to buildings, lights etc. that are indirect costs to the university for hosting the research effort. The percentage that is added to the budget in indirect costs is negotiated between each institution and funding agency. The reality is that the once the indirect costs for the grant are received by the university, that money can be used to pay for any expense in its budget and it is. So what really happens is the 40–70% received in indirect costs is used to operate the university and becomes part of its annual budget. These indirect costs can account for as much as 60%+ of the university’s annual budget, with the contribution from the legislature being as low as 5% in some states, tuition accounting for 20–25% and gifts covering the remaining 10–15% of university operating cost. To put these numbers in perspective, during the first 12 years of my career as a professor, I was very successful in obtaining grant funding, and the amount of money that the university received in indirect costs off of my grants was quite a bit larger than my annual salary. Those grants also paid salaries to 4 to 6 graduate students each year (along with their tuition expenses), a post-doc’s annual salary and part-time income to several undergraduate students. During that that period I taught the same number of courses as all of the other faculty. In effect, during that period, I taught a full course load for free for the state, because my salary was compensated for by the research overhead that my grants brought into the university.Perhaps now some of you can understand why Research is so important at universities. Like everything else in the world, it’s all about money. Ironically, it was during this same period that legislators began cutting the state contributions to university budgets. Since funding was also declining at the research funding agencies, universities only had tuition increases and increased requests for gifts to use as a means to cover the budget short-fall created by reductions in the state contribution to university budgets. The increases in tuition angered the public and lead them to demand for more from universities. People began to focus on how many courses we teach and to criticize faculty for not working very hard (because the public does not understand how universities work). In response to the public outcry , the legislature put pressure on universities to focus more on teaching. Of course that pressure trickled down to faculty who are already stretched far too thin. Ultimately I feel that it all lead to reduced respect for faculty by the public and students.Is being a professor easy? Hell no, and not only is it not easy, faculty often are poorly compensated for it and do not receive the respect that their hard work should earn for them in the USA.

Other than requesting information on their general implementation approach and recommendations, I think it’s important to ask vendors about client history and post-implementation support.Firstly, what is the average implementation time for projects of this size and complexity? What percentage of your implementation projects have gone over budget? If the vendor indicates that their solution may require some customization to fit your needs, ask for more information on their prior projects that have included customization. Were they delivered on time and on budget?One of the biggest issues we’ve seen in the industry is when vendors try to make client businesses fit their software solution, rather than providing a software solution to fit the client’s business processes. If a vendor is coming in and proposing extensive customization, it can become a very costly and time-consuming endeavor and the risk of project failure increases.It’s also important to request information on post-implementation support. Is the vendor the owner of the software or are they a reseller? Will the customization that they’re proposing affect your ability to get continuous updates from the software developer? Will the post-implementation support be delivered by the people who wrote the software, or from a reseller who is only trained on the software?There are many items to take into consideration when selecting a new ERP system, but the main one is to find one with the closest fit to your business requirements and whether the vendor has a history of successful and within-budget implementations.