Checking Bid Quality

There are clear advantages to be gained from treating the quality management of bids as a continuous procedure built into their development from the start, rather than a task undertaken only at the final stage. Your chances of success may depend on getting small details right. It is important to check the bid thoroughly for accuracy, completeness and quality of presentation. The production timetable may allocate time at the end of the process for the text and graphics to be checked before the definitive version is printed out, but experience shows that if this is left until late the time available can easily be consumed by other pressures: in the worst cases, bids can leave the office unchecked, so that the first person to spot an obvious error is the client.

Quality management has three aspects. The first is strategic - ensuring that:

• whatever requirements the client has expressed about the content, structure and submission of the bid are recognized and observed;

• the client's view of the contract and its priorities has been properly understood and reflected in the bid;

• the text puts forward a balanced approach to the work;

• the basis on which the price of the work is calculated matches accurately the proposed technical input.

The second aspect is tactical - detecting and correcting word-processing errors, factual mistakes, miscalculations, misspellings, omissions, inconsistencies in layout and so forth. Search for mistakes, check points of detail fastidiously and take nothing for granted. For example:

• Is one person shown in the work programme as performing two full-time activities simultaneously?

• Are two people claiming credit in their CVs for identical project responsibilities?

• Are all the CVs in place, and in the order that corresponds to the team listing in the text or CV index?

• If the text includes tables, do the numbers add up correctly and correspond with information given elsewhere in the text?

• Are graphics in the right places and the right order and consistent with the text? Do they have the right captions?

• Is the client's name spelt incorrectly? Contracts have been lost for that.

It is always useful to have the text and graphics looked through by someone who was not involved in preparing the bid but understands the subject well enough to spot points that may seem questionable or need clearer explanation. One critical part of this task is ensuring that the production schedule for the bid graphics is able to accommodate any late changes in the proposed work programme and team composition or time inputs.

Thirdly, there is what may be termed the competitive aspect of quality management. Does the document have the necessary ingredients to make it a successfully competitive bid - insight and penetration, creativity and innovation, energy and enthusiasm, in addition to value for money and technical confidence? Does it express the message that your bid offers a distinctive added value that clients will not be able to obtain from your competitors?

If you maintain a protected text of the bid, as advocated above, keep it in a directory or folder accessible to everyone with an interest in the contract. This allows the progress and quality of the bid to be monitored throughout its development, so that managers can read the text at any time, suggest any necessary changes in direction early in the day and reduce the possibility of encountering disagreeable surprises at the last minute.

Some firms use what is termed a 'red team' to review the bid when it is close to a final draft. The job of this team is to read through the bid as if they were the client's evaluation panel, checking to see how competently it meets the requirements of the contract and how fully it matches the client's evaluation criteria. They adopt a devil's advocate role, challenging the thinking in the bid, searching for weaknesses and inconsistencies, and suggesting how the shortcomings they find in the text can be put right.

The red team procedure is no substitute for a continuous quality review. First, if the people forming the team are sufficiently informed about both the client's view of the contract and its technical content to play a red team role effectively, they ought to be providing original input to the bid rather then commenting at a distance and at a stage when it might be difficult to accommodate their changes coherently. Second, maintaining this review team will probably be cost-effective only on bids for particularly high-value contracts. Third, experience shows that 'us and them' tensions can easily build up between the people writing the bid and the people on the red team, especially if no one on that team takes the trouble to discuss the reasons why a particular approach was taken. Red teams should not just 'red-pen' the text: if they think something is inadequate they have a responsibility to put forward a better solution.