Chapter 25: Ten True Stories

Overview

1

Companies seeking to pre-qualify for an EC-funded assignment were asked to include details of selected projects in their expressions of interest. One research unit sent in a form that surprisingly omitted its most relevant work. Dismayed by its failure to pre-qualify, the unit phoned the contracting authority to ask what the problem had been. The contracting authority explained that the procurement rules meant they could take into account only the information submitted in the expression of interest: it was unfortunate that the unit's selection of references had not included its key projects. 'But they are so well known we assumed you didn't need to be told about them,' was the reply.

2

A consortium of UK and local contractors had been shortlisted for the preliminary design of a mass transit system in an overseas capital. Representatives of the UK firms were helping to put the bid together in the offices of local associates. Its preparation was a complex task involving the coordination of a mass of specialist inputs, copious amounts of translation and intricate negotiations between the consortium members to meet a two-week deadline.

The design and appearance of the document received detailed attention: because of the importance of the project, the first-ranked bid would have to be placed on the desk of the president of the republic for his approval. As a consequence of all these pressures, the printing of the three-volume bid required an all-night session on the eve of the submission date. Waiting for the copies to emerge, the senior UK representative read through the text of the bid. No one had found time to do that properly before. At 4 am he discovered that the consortium was volunteering to produce full tender documentation for the next stage of system design, all within the same fixed price. After a brief explosion of anger and a hastily convened meeting, the text was revised and reprinted. The bid was delivered to the client with just half an hour to spare.

3

One bid that was not so lucky reached the offices of the client, a public sector authority in the UK, five minutes after the deadline. It was sent back unopened. The courier who brought it had been delayed in traffic and then found difficulty in locating the client's address. The authority considered it had no option but to apply the rules of the competition strictly.

4

The client had made it clear that only fully compliant bids would be considered. The contractor's management summary, the first item in the bid, included a formal statement to the effect that the bid was compliant in all respects. The credibility of this claim was undermined in the very next part of the bid, which introduced a series of conditions, variations and prevarications, partly as improvements to the scope of work and partly as reflections of the superior experience of the contractors. It was clear to any perceptive reader that the bid was not at all compliant. Despite the effort that the contractor had put into the bid, it did not progress far in the evaluation.

5

The structure of bids was left for contractors to decide. One firm started with eight pages of historical background about itself and its services: the first words were 'In 1864 when the firm's founding fathers first came together...' This was for a contract due to start in 2002. The client was first mentioned on page 11 of the bid and then only in passing.

6

The client required bids to include the names of three previous clients who could be approached for references about the work done by the contractor. One bidder chose to name only the managers in its own organization who had been responsible for the contracts. When the suicidal nature of this approach was pointed out, its argument was that clients could not be expected to know the technical details of the work, and anyway its performance record was commercially confidential. Do you need to be told the result?

7

The pitfalls of repeating word for word what the client writes in the bid specification were brought home to one contractor who was unaware that the data given in the specification contained a factual error that had since proved particularly embarrassing to the client. The contractor might have been able to plead that it was misled by the client had it not presented the inaccurate information under the guise of its own research!

8

The bid specification had invited comments on the terms of reference. One of the competitors, a firm of consulting engineers, thought the invitation meant that they were expected to respond to every single clause in the client's document. The problem was that they had little to say about its content. As a result that section of their bid consisted mainly of lists of clauses with the comment, 'No comment'.

To make things worse, they called the section 'Qualification of the terms of reference'. The client regarded that as an unhelpful choice of wording. Some of its managers initially wanted to reject the bid, arguing that it was not open to bidders to qualify either the terms of reference or their response, since variant solutions were not allowed. Eventually they accepted that the firm's 'qualifications' were inconsequential matters of detail and the bid went through for evaluation. But the error cost the bid valuable marks.

9

Contractors often fail to project adequately the competitiveness of their response. For example, an expert named as a team member in one bid had worked a few years back on the client's staff, where he had done a successful job and still had many friends; but the only mention of this experience was buried deep within his CV.

While preparing the bid, the contractor had made a visit to the contract site; but few perceptions came through about what had been learnt from talking to people there, and the fact that there had actually been a visit was far from obvious. An important part of the work was a set of actions to improve the client's laboratory facilities. These were introduced one by one in a long sequence of paragraphs, whereas it would have been more effective to start the account with an overall statement of the improvement programme so that the client saw the broad picture before reading about the details.

10

The evaluation panel examining another bid found it not too far off the mark in terms of technical quality and price. But they were irritated by strange and unexplained inconsistencies. For example, the bid specification referred to a 'project manager' whereas the terms 'project director' and 'team leader' were used interchangeably by the contractor to denote the same role. The client had talked about tasks and activities: in the bid these became 'components and sub-components'. The bid specification required the successful contractor to set up a series of 'launch workshops'; in the text of the bid they were called 'inception workshops for senior management', while a related figure showed them as 'vision workshops'. Fertile ground for confusion.