I am working with a company which is initializing a fairly large development project which will be outsourced.  They want to produce an Request for Proposal which they can give to their prospective suppliers.

They are starting to use Scrum internally and some of their suppliers have been using Scrum as well - but this is the first time they are doing a from the ground up agile project planning.

The project will be providing integration between several very complex standalone client/server applications, to provide a unified work-flow through a very complicated business process. Our is-it-a-house or is-it-a-skyscraper analysis indicates it will probably take at least a year to implement.

I am advising and assisting a business team of two people.  No developers are involved yet.

My goal is to reliably deliver business value every quarter.

My thinking is we should first determine the business case. How much return can we expect from each integration step. How much from the total integration? This will help prioritize and determine how much each phase of the  integration is worth, i.e. what is the budget for the project on a phase by phase basis?

We should the take a first pass at understanding the users and writing an initial set of user stories.

We should prepare a vision for the commercial cooperation - i.e. how should be contracts be structured? I am thinking some sort of multistage cost or shared benefit contract would be most appropriate.

I am thinking that the RFP should present at least these three items:

• the budget -- the bottom line result of the business case analysis
• the personae and user stories - a description of what the system should do and who it should do it for
  
• the proposed contractual relationships

I am also thinking that we should put in some proposals on the definition of done, how to measure progress, and measuring quality (this has been a problem in the past).

What I am less clear on is how much to say about technology - there is a lot of back end databases and the information flow is numerically intensive, and I think the application would benefit from some Adobe-Flex-like technology.

Does anyone have any experience to validate this approach?

Thanks in advance,

Peter