Bid Management

In essence the bid management process is simple; assemble the best team that you believe can put together a winning submission. The theory behind it sounds simple but when your Bid team includes upwards of 20 senior managers the process is a completely different challenge, becoming increasingly difficult to co-ordinate and manage.

Last week’s article covered the bid process, including a brief snippet of the challenges faced during the formulation of a bid. This week I will endeavour to delve deeper into the potential problems, and provide recommendations to counteract such problems.

Are you intrigued by the potential problems you could face, you should be, identifying the problems and implementing a robust framework detailing contingency actions will dramatically increase your bidding success. The bid management process is not one to be taken lightly and can often be a rocky road with numerous hurdles; it requires specialist management that understand the bidding process and how to maximise resources within what can often be a restricted time frame.

I have selected few issues that arise during the bid management process:

Team cohesion
How the team bond as group in their designated roles can have a massive impact on the success of the bid. The role of the management team is crucial to create an atmosphere so that everyone believes that they are part of the team and crucial to the success; increasing team motivation!

Team politics
It is vital that internal team politics do not overshadow the bid process; ask yourself is every member of the team pulling in the same direction, are there any underlying hidden agenda’s?

Organisational politics
The organisational structure and cultural policies will interfere with the bid process. Existing internal politics; including communication and management channels can often delay the process.

Annual leave
Pre-booked holidays of influential members of staff can have a huge impact on the quality of the submission; you want all of your senior management involved and need to ensure that procedures are in place to ensure that the information that they possess in relation to the bid, is readily available and beneficial.


Communication
Within large organisations communication can often act as a block that reduces productivity and efficiency, factors that affect communication can include:
• Office location
• Management hierarchy
• Cultural differences

A Bid theme?
One of the common misconceptions of bidding is that you treat each submission question individually. This is where our extensive experience comes into fruition; we understand what the evaluator requires, a bid theme which runs throughout the document is crucial to make you stand out from your competitors; whether this is in price, quality, supply chain management etc. It demonstrates to the evaluator the thought and planning that has gone into the submission and a clear focus.

Conclusions
The appointment of a specialist bid management team such as Executive Compass reduces the impact of these issues which can be detrimental to success of the Bid. We have in place robust procedures that counteract the issues mentioned throughout this article. From our extensive experience in Bid Management we have been able to identify the crucial ingredients of a successful bid;

• Ensure 100% commitment from everyone involved
• Everyone on the Bid team needs to believe that the bid they submit can win
• High level commitment

Luke O'Neill