Consulting Journal: Bid management

Bid management: First evaluation

by David Blakey

The first evaluation should provide the first 'go/no-go' decision.

[Monday 14 January 2002]

A request has come in from a prospect. As bid manager, you have asked various people to evaluate it. For details, see my previous article. Here's what you should expect to happen.

Each evaluator must be clear about the evaluation that they are doing.

The bid manager should bear in mind that people may have worked on previous bids. These people will have experience of working through the series of evaluations involved in the bid management process. As a result, they may tend to anticipate subsequent stages of the bid process and so carry out evaluations that really should be done later. You should ensure that they do only complete a preliminary evaluation.

The purpose of this first evaluation is to decide whether each section of the request can be responded to in a bid.

The question that the bid manager is asking is: ‘Can we do this?’

The evaluators should be discouraged from moving forward into developing responses to the bid. That will come later.

Unfortunately, the people who are best suited to perform this first evaluation are the people best suited to develop the responses to the sections they are evaluating. The tendency to start to look for those responses can be difficult to restrain.

The first evaluation should be completed quickly. The evaluators should not have so much material that they cannot read it completely once in 30 minutes, and careful study should not take more than an hour. (You may have draft contracts in the bid material that will take considerable study. These should not affect the answer to your question: ‘Can we do this?’ You can probably ignore them for the preliminary evaluation.)

It is reasonable to allow a total of four hours for each of the evaluators to study the material and reach their conclusions.

As requests are usually received at the start of the business day, and distribution may take until mid-morning, the evaluators can work through until late afternoon. This is good, as the bid manager can schedule the presentations for the last hour of the working day. This tends to keep the individual presentations short.

Each evaluator should state

whether the bidder can respond to the bid;
whether there are any difficulties in terms of the questions being asked; and
whether these difficulties can be resolved.

Evaluation meeting

During the evaluation meeting, the bid manager can do a simple scoring exercise.

In the ideal situation, all the evaluators will state that they can respond to the bid and that it presents no problems.

In a good situation, less than half of the evaluators will have identified a problem and none of them will have identified more than two.

In a difficult situation, some of the evaluators may be less positive about responding to the request, and most of them will have identified two or more problems.

The bid manager should note all the presentations, and close the meeting with a summary of whether the situation is ideal or good or difficult. Experienced evaluators will already know this. The bid manager is actually confirming that everyone else has reached the same conclusion.

Evaluation recommendations

The bid manager can then report to the bidder's management that

the bid management process should continue;
the bid presents some difficulties, although not enough to prevent the bid management process from proceeding; or
the bid faces considerable difficulty, and the bid manager will need to examine the request more carefully before making a recommendation.

In severe cases, the bid manager may actually recommend not continuing with the bid. This is rare, and, in my experience, has only occurred when the request itself was seriously flawed.

Most flawed requests contain a requirement to implement a technical solution defined by the prospect that is either inappropriate (in terms of a large-scale solution for a small-scale business or vice versa) or is ineffective (in terms of being outdated or of not using available technologies). Sometimes, flawed requests have required the bidder to perform unnecessary customization or to do work better performed by an outsourcer or other external service provider.

In these instances, I have recommended that the bidder should inform the prospect immediately.

In most instances, the prospect has withdrawn the request.

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