Consulting Journal: Bid management

Bid management: Initial work

by David Blakey

We take a pause to look at the initial work that a bid manager needs to do.

[Monday 29 September 2003]

We shall consider the amount of work that the bid manager has to do early in the bid process. We have already seen that the bid manager needs to: develop the first version of risk analysis and management plans for the bid and for the resultant business; develop the first version of the budgets for the bid and for the resultant business; brief the bid team; hold the first bid meeting; recommend the first "go / no-go" decision; and, now, build a communications plan. All of these tasks need to be completed quickly after the client receives the bid request from the prospect. They should be completed within one working day.

Five factors

Before this all starts to look too difficult, let me describe five factors that influence a bid manager's ability to complete these tasks quickly.

Familiarity

As if most consulting techniques, the most difficult assignments will be the first ones that you do. Bid management is not ‘black box’ consulting: you cannot do it on your own without any work by your client. On the contrary, most of the work of preparing the bid and much of the management of that work will be done by your client. When you become an experienced bid manager, you will be able to educate new clients in the techniques of bid management. On your early bid management assignments, you are likely to manage bids for clients who are also unfamiliar with these techniques. This can make these early assignments doubly difficult. But that will pass.

As you become more familiar with the techniques of bid management, you will be able to initiate new bid processes faster.

Tools

As your familiarity with bid management grows you will develop your own tools. You may detect that a particular client will always face a particular set of risks. These risks will be caused by the way that the client does business. Whenever you manage a bid for that client, you will be able to list this risks and the methods for managing them. You may also detect a set of risks that always occur for any client selling to a particular sector, such as central government, or for any client selling particular services, such as outsourcing. Once you know that a given set of risks will always be present, your first version of risk analysis and management will be easier and faster to prepare. This is not restricted to risks: some clients will have standard ways of preparing and presenting budgets, for example.

You will be able to set each new bid up faster by using these tools.

Timing

Your client may know in advance that the prospect will send them an invitation to bid. They may have responded to a request for information (RFI) or a request for expressions of interest (EOI). They may be confident that they will be asked to bid. They may ask you to manage the bid from the time that they receive the bid documents from the prospect. If you could start your assignment before then, you could save some time when the bid documents do arrive.

Experienced bid managers, working with experienced clients, will reduce the amount of work they have to do when they receive the bid documents down to only those tasks that depend upon the content of those documents.

Timeliness

If your client will decide that they will not continue with the bid, then this decision needs to be made as quickly as possible. Every additional hour that people work on the bid will cost the client money. If you conclude that a bid presents difficulties that may lead to a ‘no-go’ decision, you should present the situation to the client as quickly as possible. We may call these difficulties ‘show-stoppers’. During the early work on a bid, you may encounter problems and difficulties. You should learn how to identify the show-stoppers so that you can accelerate the work that will lead to a ‘go / no-go’ decision by your client.

Experienced bid managers will continually check for show-stoppers and will take rapid action as soon as they find one.

Change

Everything can be changed. Your client should not expect that the first version of any work at the start of the bid process will be the final version. They should expect change as the bid progresses and as you and the bid team gain more knowledge about the prospect's motives, objectives, strategies, politics, infrastructure and processes. In most cases, this knowledge will increase rather than decrease your estimates of risk probabilities and impacts and of the costs of either the bid or the resultant business or both. I have never worked on a bid where an early ‘no-go’ recommendation has been proved wrong by learning more about the prospect. In some instances, my client has made a ‘go’ decision rather than accept my ‘no-go’ recommendation: I have never changed my recommendation later during these bids. I have worked on several bids where I have reversed an early ‘go’ recommendation as a result of gaining more information about the prospect's goals, methods or environment.

Summary

Once you have considered these five factors, you may agree with me that a bid manager needs to present the results of a lot of work very early in the bid process but how that work is done and how it is presented and how it is used by the client will become easier to control as the bid manager gains experience, knowledge and confidence.

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