Sales & Business Development
Solution Design
Translate requirements, assessment findings, constraints, dependencies, and risks into a proposed solution architecture — then verify it actually holds together before Estimate begins.
- Trigger
- Integrated Assessment complete for all applicable modules.
- Owner
- Estimator
- Participants
- Inputs
- Operational Requirements.
- Assessment findings.
- Constraints/risks log.
Steps
- Draft the solution summary and system architecture.
- Define system components/categories, conceptually — not specific SKUs.
- Document physical design considerations.
- Summarize power and network requirements arising from the design.
- Assign cybersecurity ownership considerations.
- Document assumptions, exclusions, and known risks.
- Identify required customer actions and required third-party actions.
- Derive candidate Acceptance Criteria from each requirement.
- Run the Design Validation gate before handing off to Estimate.
Decision points
- Design Validation gate: critical requirements addressed, assessment gaps resolved or explicitly accepted, physical/power/network/cybersecurity considerations addressed, dependencies understood, material failure modes considered, customer/third-party responsibilities documented, risks documented, Acceptance Criteria identifiable, no unresolved contradiction that would make pricing unreliable → READY / READY WITH DOCUMENTED EXCEPTION / NOT READY.
- Outputs
- Structured solution design summary, Acceptance Criteria candidates, and the Design Validation result.
- Failure / exception path
- Design Validation returns NOT READY — routed back to Integrated Assessment for the specific unresolved gap, not a full restart. READY WITH DOCUMENTED EXCEPTION proceeds to Estimate with the exception logged for later resolution.
Candidate system state transition
Opportunity → DESIGN_VALIDATED
The Design Validation gate passed, or passed with a documented exception — the opportunity is ready for Estimate Preparation.
Documented for Phase 2 — no state machine exists yet.
Related system objects
Related lifecycle stages
Related standards
Related forms
None yet
SOPs
None yet
Future automation opportunity
Auto-check each Design Validation condition against captured Assessment/Requirements data, surfacing only genuinely unresolved gaps rather than a manual re-read of everything.
Required data
- Solution summary and component list
- Power/network/cybersecurity summaries
- Assumptions, exclusions, risks
- Customer/third-party actions
- Acceptance Criteria candidates
- Design Validation result