Interning at Clearly Innovative: Week 5
Week 5 in three words: proposals, apps, heat!
An often overlooked, but absolutely vital, aspect of running a company that provides mobile solutions (or, really, any contract-based business) is proposal writing! Moreover, searching for Requests For Proposals (RFPs) and then drafting responses to these documents is a time-consuming, but necessary, task. Early last week, Senior Solutions Provider Kwasi Frye, fellow intern Martia Simms-Beard and myself began to tackle a Google Drive folder appropriately titled “Current RFP’s”.
The Clearly Innovative team usually begins work on projects from one of two sources: either a lead where the client contacts the company directly, or after winning a bid in response to an RFP (more often than not, issued by a government agency or municipality). These proposals can get lengthy, and are usually repetitive in nature, but realizing that this is the first step in the entire project process gives me a good sense of accomplishment. Without leads or winning bids, the company would have no projects to work on! Not to mention, as a business development/computer science major with strong writing skills that I have aquired over the years, this area is right up my alley.
Example of a mobile application created by the Clearly Innovative team.
This past week, I also got the opportunity to continue my contributions to a mobile app that the Clearly Innovative developers are currently building. Previously, I had created a sitemap for this mobile application (the details of which are to be kept confidential), as well as typed-up a requirements documentation file. After the developers put in some good hours building the app, I was tasked with testing this early version and jotting down bugs and needed fixes.
The last word in my three word summary of Week 5 was “heat.” Need I say more?