Challenge Overview
We're looking for two templates for our client facing representatives to use to capture customer "wins". A customer win is a project that gets completed using TopCoder's platform & community, in part or in whole. Project is fairly ambiguous - it could be a project to create help docs for a system, or test an API, build a new product, generate ideas, or optimize an algorithm. We've seen clients run all of these kinds of projects (and more) on the platform.
Measuring project ROI
Tthe spreadsheet should provide three ways to evaluate a project (all of them use the finalized game plan as input):
1. Comparative ROI - using all the contests in the project generate an estimated man hours. This would then be used to generate a level of effort to do project traditionally, and PM can input an estimated labor rate to compare.
2. An estimate comparison would let an estimate for the project be entered (i.e. from another vendor or the customer) and compare the costs.
3. An absolute ROI calculation - this would take a normal ROI calculation (i.e. the project saves/generates so much money a quarter after deployment) and calculates ROI at a series of check points (one year ROI from deployment for example.)
The spreadsheet should have a summary tab that presents all the data from the project (timeline, contests, etc.) plus each available ROI.
Project Write Up
This will be a word document that captures the project description, at least the following sections would be used:
1. Customer Reason for Project
2. Project Approach and Technology
3. Projects Discussion, including quotes from key customer, TC staff, members, and system users.
4. Discussion of ROI
5. Lessons learned - if we did it again, what should we do differently?
Make the word document as easy as possible to complete (consider the excel would be input to the word doc at some point.)
The goal is to use the completed Word and Excel templates (i.e. once all project data is added) as inputs to contests to create PDF, PPT Slide, and Web Page "simple" case studies for sales and marketing.
Final Submission Guidelines
Word and Excel are prefered format, but Open Office or Google Doc are acceptable as well. Winner will be responsible for conversion to MS formats if anything is not convertable.