How last-minute ‘good ideas’ can jeopardise bid quality and compliance

In a recent LinkedIn post I explained how having a single, corporate bid development process, continuously improved and applied with discipline, could help increase the probability of winning (pWin) for all your bids. It would be even better to set up a bidding centre of excellence that addresses all aspects of bid writer selection, training, tools, and a certified quality management bid process.

In this blog I’ll focus on how last-minute inputs to your bid draft can damage the quality of your submission, potentially to the point of non-compliance and the actions you can take to address this risk.

As a starting point, I’ll assume you have a good bid development process and competent bid writers.
What do I mean by last-minute input? This is new content or a new perspective that gets introduced so late in the process that it unintentionally compromises the quality of the response. The immediate challenges facing you may include:

• It might arrive too late for you to test its relevance and accuracy effectively. It won’t matter how interesting the input may be, it may not address evaluation or scoring criteria or may simply be wrong.
• You might not have the time or capacity to properly integrate it into the relevant response section, which could disrupt the coherence of the overall response.
• If it is in an inconsistent writing style or presentation to the rest of the response it will need editing.
• If you are having a word or page-count challenge (and who isn’t?) it may ‘crowd out’ content that could score you more points.

You may recognise some of these examples:

Parallel Lives

You can provide the customer with a great product, but you need to do some design and testing first to meet the requirements. However, you don’t know the requirements until the tender is issued, so you end up writing the response while designing the solution in parallel. The engineers might also be viewing the submission date as their ‘design freeze’ deadline.

Two weeks to submission and your draft is long on promises of what you will do, but little detail of how you will do it. You finally persuade the capture lead or bid director that you are missing essential information, and a trickle becomes a flood of incoming data and diagrams.

You do your best to incorporate it into the draft, but it arrives too late for a thorough quality review, like a Red Team. Your main focus is on ensuring compliance, though you know it’s not perfect. The first proper review takes place at a ‘white glove’ workshop just days before submission.

As a result, the customer’s evaluators may have less confidence in your ability to deliver the solution, potentially lowering your score. This could be critical, as many competitions get decided by just a few percentage points.

Fatal Distraction

This is a variation of Parallel Lives where the Authority establishes a programme of formal meetings during the tender period to discuss potential innovations or other aspects of the commercial or technical solution. Large, complex procurements use this ‘dialogue’, as it’s called in the UK, where customer-vendor collaboration is seen as key.

With dialogue, a one-day-a-week meeting with the customer can take an additional three days of preparation and review. So the focus of execs will be almost completely on dialogue, and the tender response comes second. They aren’t available to guide the response development or even contribute to quality reviews.

The discussions continue to within a few weeks of the submission deadline, meaning that ‘solution freeze’ can come very late, giving rise to the ‘parallel lives’ issues described above. The dialogue may also develop areas of the solution which whilst they may be mutually advantageous, increasingly diverge from the written requirement or evaluation scoring criteria.

In an ideal world, the customer would re-issue the requirement and evaluation criteria to reflect what they have learned from dialogue. We saw such a re-issue several times in the last few weeks of a £bn+ procurement earlier this year, but it comes with its own challenges. But, if not re-issued, the bidder faces the dilemma of not knowing whether to write about what they have heard the customer wants in dialogue or write to the evaluation scoring criteria.

Holding Out for a Hero

With a week to go to the submission deadline, a senior executive finally clears the space in their diary to take a good look at the draft. They weren’t available for Red Team, but they are keen to add value as they know the product inside-out particularly if they are the incumbent supplier. They open the key section and find it wanting. It wasn’t what they were expecting but they can fix it.

Fueled by heroic zeal, they rewrite it overnight to match their vision of how it should be written. Given they have the power to hire, fire and award bonuses, they pressurise the bid team to submit their version with only a cursory check for spelling and grammar.

In this instance, we can be sure that there will be variations in style, consistency of terminology and coherence with other sections. This will puzzle evaluators, undermining their confidence in the bidder. An additional, and potentially more significant, issue is that our busy executive often lacks a deep understanding of the requirements or evaluation criteria. Assuming a quality process and competent writers, the initial content was almost certainly included for a reason. At worst, changes could lead to omissions and a non-compliant response.

Experienced bid professionals see these issues all the time and have to manage them as they arise. But there are a few things we can do to reduce the risk of it damaging the bid. Or, at least, damaging it less.

Actions to take to reduce the risk

Anticipate

If you’re familiar with the challenges I’ve described above, you should not be surprised when they occur. If you expect them, you can be proactive in doing something about them.

Explain

From the outset, make it clear that late changes or unplanned inputs will inevitably impact the quality of the bid—no exceptions. While you’ll use every bone in your professional body to ensure compliance, distractions from last-minute inputs will prevent you from adding the final polish. Moreover, relying on ‘all-nighters’ to fix issues leads to tired bidders and writers, which increases the likelihood of mistakes. All-nighters and unexpected weekend work are signs of a struggling team.

Plan

If you anticipate receiving late input, you have options. Ideally, establish a ‘design freeze’ or at least a near-freeze at a point that may not be perfect but is manageable. Your writers can plan their sections up to this freeze-point and then fill in the solution afterwards. If a sequential approach isn’t possible, involve your writers in the solution development as it unfolds, so they can start writing in parallel. The solution may evolve, but the writers will stay in sync with those changes.

By following these steps, you can reduce the negative impact of last-minute changes and improve the overall quality of your bids.

Article published: August 2024