Prashanth Menon

The Centre for Environment Education AUG 2000 TO DEC 2000 I did an internship at the CEE where I was trained in the nuances of environmental journalism and project management through a fortnightly publication of media feeder magazines. The other responsibilities were to manage ongoing projects and organize panel discussions on policy matters related to environmental issues.

Bachelor of Science (Agriculture), University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India 1996-2000 OAGP of 9.08 / 10.0 * OAGP - Overall average grade point Work Experience in Detail Consulting Bid Manager and People Manager, IBM FEB 2009 to Present Bid Management in IBM is a highly evolved job function and is designed in a modular template to seamlessly address the intricacies of cross Brand collaboration. Given the range of products and services IBM sells, and the fact that most of our clients operate in several countries across the globe, Bid Managers are truly challenged to step-up and be nimble so that all the elements of the bid such as resources, cost, and time are effectively managed to develop a winning proposal. * Work with the seller to identify the sales vulnerabilities, lead the deal strategy, capture the client's voice, and reinforce the win theme in the proposal * Act as the process advocate and sounding board for the bid team, provide timelines and direction for deliverables, create proposal straw-man & perform sanity checks, develop and review the executive summary, facilitate cost and solution optimization, report bid progress to the leadership, and manage client and partner communication * Create and manage the bid budget for the deal * Review the RFP, identify the scope of response, and onboard the bid team from different brands, pricers, legal attorney, technical/delivery/quality assurance, and aligned functions * Create a bid and proposal plan covering all the brands and process steps, drive deliverables in a timely manner, escalate slippage, and ensure compliance * Run solution workshop to develop solution options and identify technical, commercial, and business risks early in the bid cycle * Organize pricing call home where solutioning, delivery, and business teams can expedite cost take-out to meet the target price * Monitor bid progress and highlight critical paths; help create DOU between lines of business and participating countries, perform deal certification for integrated services * Help reduce bid TAT through ICAP, reusable proposals and ready-to-use inserts Other Responsibilities * Track SO sales pipeline and ensure 100% coverage of qualified deals; proactive deal engagement and seller value transformation * Train team members and peers on bid management and proposal writing for cross competency development and skill enhancement * Create reusable offerings to expedite proposal submission -- RFP response templates, proposal inserts, sales decks, sweet spots, sanitized proposals, and client references * Setup workflow process and handle work allocation (including requirements gathering, expectations setting, quality, delivery, and course correction)

Senior Technical Writer, Manhattan Associates JUL 2004 to FEB 2009 Warehouse Management Solutions (WMS) is a flagship product for Manhattan Associates. With a burgeoning client base across North America, Europe, and ANZ, WMS users were increasing exponentially every year. I led a team of technical writers and designers to develop, test and implement a context-sensitive online help, configuration documents, do-it-yourself reference repository, and installation guides. This was further complemented through intensive training for the Manhattan product support engineers. When the open systems enterprise software was migrated to a new platform using common business objects, we had to revisit and redo the entire Help documentation as well. * Created use case and functional specification documents for the inbound and outbound warehouse functions; the feature descriptions and validations are used by business analysts for writing pseudo code and logic, and by programmers for product development * Created product integration and system health analysis processes covering Technical Audit reports, proposals, and dashboard user guides. * Automated Warehouse Management documentation resulting in time and cost savings; enhanced output quality by integrating research-based writing, interviewing SMEs and pre-publishing the content for live testing * Trained the support engineers on the new features and functions of the Warehouse Management product * Planned, designed, and developed the Intranet website using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001. The website caters to multiple teams in India and provides centralized access to both the site owners and content authors. As the webmaster and portal administrator, I was responsible for configuring Search engines, indexing texts, taking incremental and full back-up of content, and troubleshooting the application.