Bringing Together Resources and Inputs


Time: the resource that is wasted most easily and most often. A common fault is to leave the drafting and writing of the bid until late in the day, forcing people to work frantically at the last moment. It is pointless blaming the client for not giving you longer to prepare the bid. If you are a professional and the work is worthwhile, you have to make the best effort you can in the time available. No matter how much time you have, it will never be enough unless it is managed properly. Managing time means stretching it to reach all the targets on your schedule.

Money: Do you have a budget for each bid? How much are you able to spend on a pre-submission visit? Do you monitor how effectively you use your budget? Or are you surprised when you learn just how much a bid has cost? If you don't know what you are spending on bids, they are almost certainly costing more than they should. As a rough guide, many firms find it reasonable for their bidding costs on small and medium-scale contracts to reach about five per cent of the total expected gross fee income.

When there are competing priorities, it is important to use resources in ways that make the best economic sense so as to develop bids as cost-effectively as possible. Each firm will need to identify the method of accounting for bid expenditure that offers the most effective financial control, whether this is worked out on a cost-centre basis or defined in other ways.

The essential requirements for bid budgeting are to:

  • decide a budget allocation for the variable costs attached to a bid (for example, travel and production costs): this should be a level of reasonable and affordable costs that is not exceeded without justification and agreement;

  • monitor closely expenditure on the bid;

  • develop a series of budget yardsticks as an aid to cost control and expenditure forecasts.

Information: If all you have to rely on is the information supplied by the client, you are unlikely to convince anyone that you possess the depth of first-hand knowledge and understanding that makes you the contractor best suited to do the work. The tendency simply to regurgitate information contained in the client documentation - often quoting the client word for word (but without quotation marks!) - is a persistent fault in bids and one that dismays clients. The conclusion they draw is that either you had no intelligence of your own to offer or you were afraid to put forward any ideas in case you said something wrong.

Bid preparation can be hindered also by an excess of information, for example when experts return from field visits with stacks of notebooks or computer disks crammed with material that is never used simply because its mass is so overwhelming. As a result, ideas that it would be useful to include in the bid are lost. The problem is seen in a different form when you read bids with encyclopaedic pretensions, where the bidder's message is submerged beneath a flood of detail. There are no marks to be gained by giving clients tables of information that they are perfectly well aware of. Collect information exhaustively, but apply it selectively when it comes to compiling the text. When you do include background information in the bid, never present it cold or without tying it in with the logic of the text - use it intelligently to explain and reinforce your approach.

The profusion of information on the Internet and the ability to access it instantly are factors we take for granted. A search through Web sites can deliver to your computer far more data than you could obtain in the time by any other means. The range, relevance and quality of this information and your capacity to apply it usefully in the bid are quite different matters. Key points to check before pasting material into your bid are the source of the information (is it clearly identified?); the authorship of the material and ownership of the site (does it come from a recognized organization or authority, and are you confident about its veracity?); and its date (can you trust Web pages that have not recently been updated?).

Web browsers and search engines are essential tools in background research. See whether the client has a Web site, examine related sites, print off information relevant to the project and assess its implications for the development of your bid - but, again, be careful not to feed back to clients their own material. Using a scanner will enable you to copy material into a bid, though the OCR software that comes packaged with most scanners will not be able to resolve correctly every character in a text, and you may have to spend a fair amount of time putting things right manually.

Insight: One of the most scarce and valuable bid resources, insight may be defined as an informed perception of the client's priorities, which may or may not be stated explicitly in the bid documentation. In other words, it is looking at the project from the standpoint of the client, showing that you understand what is really important to the client and demonstrating an ability to get to the heart of the matter. The way to prove this understanding is through the quality and depth of your analysis, particularly in setting out your approach to the work (Chapter 13).

Communication skills: Possessing insight is one thing, being able to communicate it is another. Because a bid is a specialized business document, its development calls for particular skills in the presentation and projection of technical material. Expert knowledge of the subject is not enough in itself: every bidder can be expected to have that. There are additional ingredients that a bid needs if it is to make its mark with the client. Weak bids read like patchworks of bits and pieces rather than the products of original thought. Strong bids convey a sense of creativity, energy and enthusiasm, as well as possessing a robust technical logic.




Bids, Tenders and Proposals. Winning Business Through Best Practice
Bids, Tenders and Proposals: Winning Business through Best Practice (Bids, Tenders & Proposals: Winning Business Through Best)
ISBN: 0749454202
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 145
Authors: Harold Lewis

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