Consulting Journal: Bid management

Bid management: Bid brief (2)

by David Blakey

Bids are often related. Their bid briefs will describe how.

[Monday 19 January 2004]

The bid brief has a wider scope than the purchaser's request for proposals. It also includes the bidder's requirements. This is important. In the previous article, I described the four elements of a bid brief in the order in which they are prepared: aims; critical success factors; resources; and the outline plan. In this article I shall discuss each of these in a different order.

Critical success factors

A single critical success factor may occur in a single bid or it may be met by any one of a number of bids. You should avoid defining a CSF so it would only be met if two or more bids were successful. If one bid will contribute x% of a target and another bid will contribute y%, then you should define the CSFs for those bids in terms of x and y.

Aims

Any one aim will be achieved by its contributing CSFs all being met.

Independent bids

Bids, CSFs and aims One aim may have a number of CSFs that are unique to that aim. None of the CSFs will contribute to another aim. If a bid only has unique aims that depend upon a number of unique CSFs, the bid will stand alone.

This will also be true if some CSFs contribute to more than one aim, provided that all those aims are unique to a single bid and that all the CSFs contribute only to aims within that single bid.

I call these independent bids. If an independent bid wins, then all its CSFs and aims will be met.

This is illustrated by the relationship between bid B-1, CSF C-1 and aim A-1. B-1 is an independent bid.An example is an outsourcing bid that depends upon acquiring a help desk facility. If only one current bid requires the bidder to acquire the purchaser's help desk, then only that bid can met the CSF.

Synchronous bids

Some CSFs may be met by any one of a number of bids that the bidder is making at the same time. If one of these bids wins, then the common CSFs will be satisfied by that one bid. The aims that are dependent upon those CSFs will also be met. If all of the aims of all of the bids are common and can be achieved by winning any one of those bids, then the bids are synchronous.

This is illustrated by CSF C-2, which can be met by either bid B-2 or bid B-3. The same example can apply. If a number of bids depend upon the bidder acquiring a help desk, and if one bid is successful and results in the purchase or takeover of a help desk, then that CSF will be met for all subsequent winning bids.

Concurrent bids

Some of the bidder's requirements may be met partially by each of a number of CSFs, and those CSFs may be met individually by a number of bids. In order to meet these requirements, the bidder needs to win more than one of the bids. I call these bids concurrent.

This is illustrated by CSF C-3, which can only be met if both bids B-3 and B-4 are won.Using the same example, the aim may be to have a help desk of six staff. Two of these staff may be transferred from each of three customers as a result of winning bids. All three bids will have to be won in order to reach the aim of a fully-staffed help desk.

Outline plan

Because a number of bids may be linked because of their aims for the bidder, it is obvious that the outline plans may also be linked. To use the example given above, there may be an aim for an outsourcer to acquire six help desk staff. This may be written as individual CSFs into each bid. There are several ways in which the outline plans for the bids can be affected by actions on another bid.

Once other successful bids have resulted in six new help desk staff, there is no need for any other bids to have the acquisition of staff as their aims. At the other extreme, some successful bids may not result in new staff, either because the purchaser does not want to transfer them or because the bidder does not want them, so, in this case, the aim of acquiring staff would remain as an aim for other bids.

All of this works if there is a bid strategy. Although the development and implementation of a bid strategy is not a subject that I intend to approach for a while, it should be clear that there are advantages to managing all bids within a strategy, rather than managing each bid on a one-off basis.

Incidentally, without any formal bid management, proposals are likely to be run as if they were a fourth kind of bid: ‘universal’ bids. People have pointed out to me that they believe that proposal preparation without bid management is more like having independent bids. I wish that I could agree. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that a bidder working without formal bid management will actually identify the aims and CSFs that are unique to each bid. They will tend, therefore, to adopt - by default - a set of universal aims and critical success factors.

Resources

Finally, it follows from linking the outline plans that much better resource planning and prioritization can be adopted.

Decisions can be made at a strategic level that will divert resources from bids that are progressing well to bids that are ailing or that will divert resources from dying bids to improve healthy ones.

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