Last Minute Bid and Tender Writing

Last minute bid writingis not for the faint hearted. In this, the fourth of five blogs we discuss how you can ensure your bid writing is kept on schedule and your bid is submitted on time.

The best way to ensure your bid does not fall behind is simply to start early. Too many people underestimate the time it takes to write a quality bid and end up taking advantage of our last minute bid writing. Now while that is good for our business it can be avoided.

So start early with your bid writing and create a bid writing plan. You must have a plan. It does not have to be overly complicated and you do not need specialist software, Microsoft Excel is more than adequate, but you must have a plan in place and it must be monitored and people must be accountable.

The easiest way is to create a plan in excel

• Read the bid early do not leave it until the last minute

• You should read the bid several times before you even begin to think about writing anything

• Start the plan by writing down the bid submission date and today’s date

• Split your bid writing plan down into weekly and daily sections

• Begin to populate your bid writing plan with key dates. Cut off dates for clarification questions, client bid meetings etc

• Make sure that all the holidays of all your bid writers are inserted plus any Bank Holidays

• With the dates of your bid writing plan running along the top insert your bid writers vertically and colour code each writer

• Similar to a Gannt chart begin to insert the elements of the bid against the names of the bid writer and place dates and milestones

• Your bid writing plan should include regular bid writing review meetings

• Your bid writing plan should be realistic and challenging but always try to leave some contingency. Bid writing can be exhausting when under pressure, try to make sure that you do not set too tough or unrealistic bid writing schedule.

Your bid writing plan should include time for proof reading and binding. Your last minute bid writing may get all the words down but if you do not leave time for error checking and sense making then you may as well not have written the bid in the first place.
The next blog will discuss final delivery and submission

Short notice bid writing services