Too many tender writers spoil the broth

Co-ordination is key when organising a tender writing project within your organisation. There are so many different elements involved in bringing a bid together that many organisations struggle to carry it off in a coherent and professional manner.

Successfully managing multiple internal and external writers and specialists is a important part of effective Bid Management, a skill that is vital to ensuring long term tender success.

All projects need a leader - Large tenders are no different to any other big business project. Someone has to plan, oversee and coordinate the disparate elements that form the whole. The tender writing project must be planned effectively from the outset, taking into account deadlines, requirements and important players in the process. Identifying key players and assigning specific duties with strict deadlines will ensure that all of the required information is brought together at the right time.

Multiple writers need one voice - Assigning specific parts of the tender to individual writers is a great way of delegating the large amount of creative work required to get the project finished. The problem is that writing is unique to the writer, rather like the way people speak or wear clothes. Whilst this is to be encouraged in general, a good quality tender needs to be uniform in style and have a recurrent theme throughout which can be lost amongst the competing voices. Ideally, key players will be responsible for gathering the information required for their specialist section of the tender and a third party, whether this is someone within the organisation or ideally, an external professional tender writer, would be responsible for writing the body of the text. This ensures that the tender reads as one voice despite involvement from multiple contributors.

Managing Knowledge - The harnessing of both data and information is crucial to tender writing success. Many organisations struggle with effective Knowledge Management and this is both a time waster and detrimental to coherent bid writing. All organisations should consider implementing a knowledge base – a repository of information, data and specialist knowledge all stored in one place and accessible to the right person at the right time. EDMS (Electronic Document Management Systems) and BMS (Bid Management Systems) are both highly effective ways of collating, organising and sharing information throughout the organisation. The benefits are two-fold. Such systems are like a library, properly indexed and quick to find and use what is needed. Additionally, it prevents the age old business problem of vital documents being poorly named and buried somewhere on the server or worse, hidden on the Marketing Assistant’s C drive whilst she’s off on holiday in Tunisia for three weeks. No one member of the organisation should possess vital business information – it should be available to all involved in the tender management process at all times to ensure that no part of the tender is weaker due to lack of essential information.