There are no failures, there never are :)
Everything is nothing more than a milestone. Once you reach it you can either sit on it, you can cry over it or you can get ready to take on the next one. The results didn't favor us but then we did cover a significant milestone. Being third in a crowd of five isn't bad after all. Next time we will beat them in their own game, on their own ground, in their territory and even foul play won't come to their rescue :P
Recently we had successfully submitted and participated in a competitive bid. It was a journey worth describing. So here I am playing narrator once again beneath the LJ-CUT...
Sony showed us the advertisement of the RFP being floated in market. We insisted him to pursue it with ED sir. He along with Manish were the one who got the things moving in the right direction. They got RFP in hand by working out the DD etc. Good work, both of you :)
Once the RFP was received, the team took up different portions of it. ED sir, for example, got into the qualification criteria while others started reading the technical requirements. The project seemed very much doable but had risks which were quite unimaginative. We had three challenges at that time
- Motivate ourselves after seeing the risk factors
- Meet the qualification criteria
- Convince support group about the project
Motivating self is not difficult once you have a bunch of self-driven people. It makes lot of things easier. The second challenge was slightly tricky. We met a few criteria but not all. Obviously it meant that we had to find partner. Which meant that there were some official procedure to be followed, an advertisement to be put up etc. To get official procedures in place, we were required to meet the third challenge - to convince local folks first. That was not an easy task because not many in government want to take risks. Living safe is better than earning opportunities. For once it even became quite frustrating for sir too (http://peeyush.livejournal.com/528142.html). Thanks to all that, we too might have given up at that juncture but then we were approached by someone who was quite keen to have us as partner. With them, things started falling in line once again and everyone started to get into the task. And then we met another road block. Myself and Urja were taking lectures for OOSP module. It was becoming difficult for us to manage lectures, on-going projects and the new proposals we were to work upon at that moment. We requested sir if we could get assistance from our sister unit at Bangalore. Thanks to Supriya ma'am, Shrikant came to our rescue. He took most of our load off during that critical time period which allowed myself and Urja to start working with team to get proposal in shape. And then what started off slowly, now started gathering momentum. Ranjan, Vikram, Vijay, Rajeev, Rekha, Sayyed, Avani, Vaishali, Rohan, Mohsin, Vikash and almost everyone started pitching in their parts, beyond their parts and the proposal started taking comprehensive shape. Of course things weren't that smooth even then. One quarterTwo superheroes of our office started teasing us about taking off-site assistance from Bangalore. Those were some irritating times because instead of appreciating those who came and helped, they weren't helping anyone with some misplaced and mistimed comments. That was the time when students came to our rescue by scoring brilliantly in the subject - http://peeyush.livejournal.com/532604.html#cutid2 :). Finally the entire proposal was delivered on time jointly with our partners. We were quite happy and satisfied.
Three weeks later we were called for presentation which was commended by the committee chair (direct end user). It was quite encouraging. We were sure to not just qualify the technical criteria but also score better than others. But then supposedly some people played ugly (if we were to believe market intelligence :)) to turn tables toward those who have repeatedly failed in delivering projects in past. Yeah, that's the only funny as well as sad part from this entire episode. The one who has had a very bad record of messing up government project was awarded this project under pretext of 'experience' and 'technical capabilities'. When people play foul they cheat no other but their own self. Greed won't take them far.
To me, we are still the winners. We did quite well. I am so very much proud of each one of you, my folks. It was all so very dreamy when we started and eventually so much satisfying to see every hurdle being crossed with everyone taking things further. Thank you all of you for taking proposal from a mere dream to a reality. You all rock!!
Yep, we are quite happy and satisfied :)
Recently we had successfully submitted and participated in a competitive bid. It was a journey worth describing. So here I am playing narrator once again beneath the LJ-CUT...
Sony showed us the advertisement of the RFP being floated in market. We insisted him to pursue it with ED sir. He along with Manish were the one who got the things moving in the right direction. They got RFP in hand by working out the DD etc. Good work, both of you :)
Once the RFP was received, the team took up different portions of it. ED sir, for example, got into the qualification criteria while others started reading the technical requirements. The project seemed very much doable but had risks which were quite unimaginative. We had three challenges at that time
- Motivate ourselves after seeing the risk factors
- Meet the qualification criteria
- Convince support group about the project
Motivating self is not difficult once you have a bunch of self-driven people. It makes lot of things easier. The second challenge was slightly tricky. We met a few criteria but not all. Obviously it meant that we had to find partner. Which meant that there were some official procedure to be followed, an advertisement to be put up etc. To get official procedures in place, we were required to meet the third challenge - to convince local folks first. That was not an easy task because not many in government want to take risks. Living safe is better than earning opportunities. For once it even became quite frustrating for sir too (http://peeyush.livejournal.com/528142.html). Thanks to all that, we too might have given up at that juncture but then we were approached by someone who was quite keen to have us as partner. With them, things started falling in line once again and everyone started to get into the task. And then we met another road block. Myself and Urja were taking lectures for OOSP module. It was becoming difficult for us to manage lectures, on-going projects and the new proposals we were to work upon at that moment. We requested sir if we could get assistance from our sister unit at Bangalore. Thanks to Supriya ma'am, Shrikant came to our rescue. He took most of our load off during that critical time period which allowed myself and Urja to start working with team to get proposal in shape. And then what started off slowly, now started gathering momentum. Ranjan, Vikram, Vijay, Rajeev, Rekha, Sayyed, Avani, Vaishali, Rohan, Mohsin, Vikash and almost everyone started pitching in their parts, beyond their parts and the proposal started taking comprehensive shape. Of course things weren't that smooth even then. One quarterTwo superheroes of our office started teasing us about taking off-site assistance from Bangalore. Those were some irritating times because instead of appreciating those who came and helped, they weren't helping anyone with some misplaced and mistimed comments. That was the time when students came to our rescue by scoring brilliantly in the subject - http://peeyush.livejournal.com/532604.html#cutid2 :). Finally the entire proposal was delivered on time jointly with our partners. We were quite happy and satisfied.
Three weeks later we were called for presentation which was commended by the committee chair (direct end user). It was quite encouraging. We were sure to not just qualify the technical criteria but also score better than others. But then supposedly some people played ugly (if we were to believe market intelligence :)) to turn tables toward those who have repeatedly failed in delivering projects in past. Yeah, that's the only funny as well as sad part from this entire episode. The one who has had a very bad record of messing up government project was awarded this project under pretext of 'experience' and 'technical capabilities'. When people play foul they cheat no other but their own self. Greed won't take them far.
To me, we are still the winners. We did quite well. I am so very much proud of each one of you, my folks. It was all so very dreamy when we started and eventually so much satisfying to see every hurdle being crossed with everyone taking things further. Thank you all of you for taking proposal from a mere dream to a reality. You all rock!!
Yep, we are quite happy and satisfied :)