Community Portal Design

Request for Proposals

August 30, 2016

Table of Contents
Project Summary ................................................................................................ 3
About Career Connect ...................................................................................... 3
Key System Goal................................................................................................. 3
Types of Users .................................................................................................... 4
Project Goals and Deliverables ......................................................................... 4
Proposal Requirements ...................................................................................... 5
Budget ............................................................................................................ 5
Project Schedule ............................................................................................ 5
Vender Selection Criteria .............................................................................. 6
RFP Submission ............................................................................................ 6

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Project Summary
Career Connect is a new unit within University of North Texas that is in the process of designing a
community portal that aims to identify community agencies (nonprofit, corporate, municipal,
small businessetc.), university students, and faculty with matching needs to support the
development of reciprocal partnerships. Career Connect seeks proposals for designing individual
components of this portal that support one or more sub-processes within the community portal.

About UNT Career Connect

Career Connect is a new opportunity designed to connect students with valuable and engaging
activities in the community. Activities include internships, volunteer work, study abroad, service
learning, research projects, etc. UNT Career Connect promotes university-wide engagement by
placing students, faculty, staff, and communities in reciprocal partnerships that promote specific
learning outcomes.
Career Connect strengthens UNT's commitment to educational excellence and relies on the strong
support faculty and staff already give our students to develop the skills students need to excel in
graduate school or stand-out as a top job candidate in the workforce.
Career Connect provides students with learning experiences outside of the classroom and helps
them build the communication, critical thinking, and teamwork skills that employers want and
need. Students will collect, connect, and showcase their experiences in the Connect e-portfolio so
they can share with employers and graduate schools. Career connect supports faculty and staff in
helping students make meaningful connections between experiences and academics. Career
Connect relies on community partners, who in turn benefit from work done by students. All Career
Connect projects must include a community partner; a reciprocal relationship with said partner, a
tangible outcome or product, use of Career Connects communication, team work, and/or critical
thinking student assessment rubric, and be integrated into the e-portfolio system.

Key Goal of the System

The goal of the Community Portal is to enable a seamless exchange of information between
Community Partners, UNT Faculty, UNT Students, and the Career Connect Office about
community partners needs, co-curricular opportunities, course project offerings and associated
service learning needs and opportunities, as well as on-going community collaboration projects in
an effort to identify and support meaningful partnerships with clear and measurable benefits for
both the community partner and university entity.
More specifically, here are several high-level organizational goals that the system should help us
achieve:

Enables UNT faculty to easily communicate collaborative opportunities offered by

individual courses to community partners so that business community partners can
approach individual instructors/students with collaboration proposals to help expand

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opportunities and resource while limiting bureaucratic challenges.

Enable community partners to communicate their needs to university faculty and

staff, so that instructors/students can approach business community partners with
collaboration proposals.

Additionally, here are several lower-level goals that the system could help us achieve:

Support faculty and stuff in structuring collaboration projects by offering templates,

standard agreement letters and advising regarding institutional and legal compliance.

Inform community partners regarding standard institutional and legal compliance

requirements associated with engaging in career connect projects.

Types of Users
It is expected that the system will be utilized by the following types of users

UNT Faculty, staff, and teaching assistants

UNT students
Community partners
Career Connect staff
PACE
Center for Leadership and Service
Other UNT organizations with significant student community engagement activity.

System users are to be expected to have limited capacity on time and potentially not
technically trained. Therefore, the system should be designed as to minimize user effort
related to data entry and provide intuitive information search and browsing capabilities.

Key Project Goals & Deliverables

The goal of the Community Portal design project is to identify key business, user and system
requirements, identify and prioritize system design options for the system or system
components. More specifically, project deliverables will include the following deliverables:

The interim report will describe key business, system name recommendations, user and
system requirements including goals of the system/system component, key
system/component stakeholders, description (textual and/or graphical) of the key
business processes underlying the system/component, key data requirements including
data requirements description, structural data model, and data flow model, nonfunctional requirements including user interface, security, and operational requirements.
Final report will outline and prioritize design choices for the system including system
acquisition options, system architecture, system name, and user interface and database

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design.
A MS Access based prototype for of the community portal database will including tables,
relationships, sample data and queries that are key to the community portal
system/component.
A proof of concept UI prototype will be completed using any prototyping tool and will
demonstrates key interactions between the user and the system/components.
Client presentation allows students to present their projects and prototypes to Career
Connect (client) at courses end.

Proposal requirements
The client will award multiple contracts for designing individual community portal components,
with up to three contracts for designing each component. Technical proposals for designing
individual system components should demonstrate the understanding of the client needs, the
goals of the system as a whole as well as of the individual component. The proposals should
clearly define the scope of work including the scope of the component to be designed, as well as
the scope of the design work to be performed in the project. Project proposals should also
provide an informative description of the overall approach to system analysis and design, and
outline specific phases of the project (if any), together with specific activities and resulting
deliverables. A summary of project schedule and budget is also to be included. Proposals should
also provide information on key team members and their technical expertise and experience, as
well as demonstrate experience with similar projects.

Budget: The project will be performed pro bono. However, a project budget needs to be
presented along with the technical proposal (in MS Excel). The project budget should
reflect subscription costs for software necessary for project activities based on a
commercial license price, as well as development labor costs based on the hourly rates of
developers and project schedule.

Project schedule should be submitted along with the technical proposal. Project
schedule should reflect the following project deadlines: *deadlines subject to change
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September 8th (week 2) Groups make initial 2 minute pitch

September 22nd (week 4) Proposal due
September 29th, October 6th, & October 13th (weeks 5-7) schedule team
meeting with Career Connect representative(s)
December 1st (week 14) Final presentation and prototype demonstration
December 8th (week 15) Final report due

Vendor Selection Criteria: When selecting a vendor for this project, we will be
evaluating candidates on the following criteria:

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Clear understanding of client need demonstrated in the proposal

Clear description of the project scope
Clear description of the approach to completing the project
Experience with system analysis and design projects
Experience working with educational institutions
Overall quality of the proposal document

RFP Submission: Please direct all responses to this RFP to Dr. Anna Sidorova who will act as
a liaison with the Career Connect office:
Dr. Anna Sidorova
Anna.Sidorova@unt.edu
(940) 565-3109

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