Reflections on creating a project proposal

Since I finished the first iteration of my project proposal, I thought that I'd talk a little bit about the process of creating it. This was essentially the first proposal that I'd ever done. It was certainly a different experience creating a proposal when I'm used to being the one that just gets told, "here's what we want, now go code it up." I found that even though I had an idea for my project, actually thinking about what would need to be done to create it was a little more difficult. It really forces to you contemplate the pros and cons of every approach and try to figure out which approach best suits your "vision" of how you want the project to take shape. I think the parts I struggled with the most were the specification requirements and the budget (though the timeline was a little tricky too since I was not quite sure how much detail to include). For me, the specification requirements were harder to write because I was not sure how "in-depth" I should get with the details of the system. Obviously, I don't want to lock myself down into doing something only one way, but I also want to provide enough detail so someone reading the proposal will have a general idea of how we plan to create the website and how all the parts will fit together. I also found the budget to be difficult since I have never had to price out a project. I've created budgets for personal use, but creating them for a project is an entirely different animal. I did some research on how people create project budgets and the advice that seemed to keep reoccurring was just to practice. Essentially, the first time you do a project budget, you're not going to know exactly what should be put in the budget or how much "padding" to include in order to offset problems and delays that arise. However, once you've done a few budgets, you start understanding what you need and the process becomes easier.

I feel that I've learned a lot from creating this proposal, though I know that I have a lot of room for improvement. Receiving feedback on it will be very helpful in order to show me what I've made mistakes on and how I can improve. Hopefully this means that the next iteration of the proposal will be a little more straightforward to create.