AI-enabled Project Initiation: An approach based on RFP Response Document

Project planning starts with the project initiation phase in which high-level project objectives, commitments, requirements, risks etc. are identified. Typically, the Project Manager involves multiple stakeholders such as HR, Admin, Infrastructure team for the initiation phase to understand and outline the requirements for each group. Current industry practice largely relies on the project manager’s experience to carry out the project initiation activities keeping in view the customer context and commitments made. Many times, important information is missed during the transfer of information from sales to delivery resulting in not meeting customer expectations and delivery slippages. Here we propose an AI-enabled approach to automatically extract and classify project initiation relevant information from Request For Proposal (RFP) response document using a combination of NLP and ML-based techniques. The approach is validated with real life RFP response documents for five customers. Overall, 76% accuracy was observed for question classification and 41% information was found to be relevant for project initiation from the RFP response documents. In this paper, we share details of our approach, its implementation, early results, and lessons learnt.