The Custom Brief — Scope Téléphonie Méridien at Alpina Executive Learning

A four-round, intermediate executive-education scoping simulation set inside Alpina Executive Learning, the custom exec-ed unit of a mid-sized French business school in Grenoble (EUR 9.2M revenue, 22% contribution margin, ~34 programmes/year, two-thirds repeat business).

On 8 June 2026 a EUR 480,000 RFP lands from Téléphonie Méridien, a 14,000-employee French telecom, for a leadership programme for 120 mid-level managers — Alpina's largest single opportunity of the year and a gateway to a multi-year framework agreement.

But the brief is contradictory: the HR sponsor wants transformational culture change, the COO who controls the budget wants measurable operational impact in six months, and the surveyed managers want practical, time-light learning. The school mandates a 20% contribution-margin floor, so deliverable cost cannot exceed EUR 384,000 — yet the first rough costing is EUR 430,000, a EUR 46,000 overrun.

Playing the Program Director, you (1) decode the brief and triangulate the three stakeholders into one fundable primary objective, anchoring on the COO's measurable-impact outcome while honouring the manager survey; (2) allocate the fixed EUR 90,000 design-and-development sub-budget across five modules — strategy, leading change, operational execution, coaching/360 and capstone — deciding where bespoke build earns its cost and where proven open modules do the job, without overspending the envelope; (3) set the open-vs-custom format mix (open substitution capped at 40% of contact hours) and close the EUR 46,000 margin gap with levers that protect the deliverable rather than gut it; and (4) pitch to the selection panel (COO + HR sponsor), price for the guaranteed 90 seats rather than the hoped-for 120, and commit to how six-month impact will be measured.

The scoring rewards stakeholder triangulation, portfolio-style design-budget allocation, a margin solve that preserves coaching and faculty, conservative fill assumptions and a relevance-led design — and measurably punishes the five classic errors: designing for the loudest stakeholder, bespoke-everything, margin-by-mutilation, optimistic 120-seat pricing and treating learner-relevance as decoration.

Final KPIs track Client-Fit, Gross Margin %, Learner-Relevance and the bid outcome against a EUR 480k cap and a 20% floor.

An intermediate simulation for participants who already know the core concepts of the subject, designed for master's and MBA programmes.