Write a Tender

Lots of companies struggle with knowing how to write a tender management. They write good responses and have some great ideas but the actual process of putting the tender together and making it cohesive and consistent gets away from them.
There are lots of elements to managing a tender. Things like managing people, competing priorities, picking the team and managing uncertainty plus the tender writing itself. However the main practical elements of tender management are:

1. Managing the information flow of the tender

There is much to think about in terms of information. It is good practice to make someone responsible from day one for collecting and collating all the information for the tender. This person is usually not involved in the actual tender writing but acts as a central information gateway. They look after all the information flows coming into the tender and control access, version control and usually provide reminders for deadlines and update the tender management plan.

They should have good attention to detail and be very good organisers. Some companies give this role of managing the tender information to a junior member of the team. This is a big mistake. Whoever has this role should have some positional power and enough authority and management skills to be able to get things done. Project management for submitting a tender can be complex and if they have no management experience or are too junior they will be unable to make the team work cohesively and unable to demand tender writing deadlines are met. Arguable this is the responsibility of the tender manager but the information gatekeeper has a vital role to play as well.

The information flow can be managed via a specially created page on the company intranet, a shared online file storage account (something like Drop Box) or simply by e-mail. Importantly though are passwords and version control. Limit access to files to only those who really need it, keep passwords up to date and ensure good version control is maintained for your tender at all times. Back ups are very important too. The best systems back up all the time, synchronising with files as soon as you close them but if yours doesn’t, just make sure that all the information is backed up regularly. Imagine having five tender writers all writing sections of your tender and then discovering you had failed to back up.

Make sure that everyone is using the same version of Word to write the tender because some diagrams do not look the same in different versions. Also make sure everyone is using the same font, headings and margins. All this should be agreed in advance and will save whoever is responsible for design and format of the tender a great deal of time.

A tender takes a lot of effort to write and while content is king your tender does need to be presented well and be consistent throughout.
Conference calls are a good way of ensuring everyone is kept up to date with all the different tender writing issues. Any information regarding the tender should be sent to everyone involved in the project. An easy way to do this is to create a group in Outlook, call it “tender” or similar and then use that for all internal communications.
However you organise the tender information system do not underestimate just how much information a tender writing project will generate. If your completed tender has 60,000 words the tender writers will have written 100,000 and will have reviewed hundreds of tender related documents.

Tender Writing Management
Public sector tenders
Last minute or short notice tenders


Next Design and Formatting

The other elements will be covered in the blogs that follow