Maintain Your Sanity with a Good Bid Response Process

Regardless of how many bids you’ve done, or how long/short the bid response period is, it is absolutely essential you set up a clear, non-negotiable process for your breakdown of time and what you are going to do when. 

Every. Single. Time.

Broadly, a bid response is split into these categories and time allocations:

1. Reading and prep (the first 10% of the response period)
2. Copy writing and content creation (40% of your bid response period)
3. Reviews (20% of your response period)
4. Production (20% of the response period)
5. Contingency time (10% of the response period)
6. Submission (24 hours before the bid is due)

Even from this high-level guide, you can see that only 40% of your time is dedicated to content creation (writing your answers). You do not have the whole response period to write. You don’t even have the majority of that time.

Using Monday.com or any other project management tool (another is Asana)

Think of Monday.com as a big interactive to-do list and task allocator (this of course is a gross simplification and the people at Monday.com would be horrified….but it’s all you need to know for now)

Prepare your bid response process by creating a ‘board’ and copy every bid question, action and task into its own line item and allocate a person to it and a due date. This simplifies bid management and timeline coordination so you can be sure you aren’t missing anything. Color-coding helps keep track of statuses and stages of the response.

If you would like to view an example Monday.com tender response board and copy it, you can send us an email at info@tenderrelief.com.au with the subject “MONDAY Template” so we can add you to our board.

Document version and quality control

When creating bid responses, it’s easy to lose track of documented versions. Monday.com helps stay on top of document creation and reviews so that anyone who logs into the board can know straight away where you are in the process.

It’s critical to have strategically allocated periods of time for reviews. Using the custom Monday board, your team and guest members (such as clients) can check review statuses to know when they can jump in to make edits and on which version of the response. This allows for document version control.

In addition to creating content for the response itself, many bids require a production period where you would utilise your design team to create, adjust, and modify response templates and graphics. You can utilise file sharing and upload features to maintain quality control and access to custom templates that are then assembled with the response to create a final copy.

We understand the importance of having contingency measures in place. Keeping track of deadlines helps to ensure you are in the right position to handle any unexpected delays or changes to the process. With the right management, your submissions are on track and on time!

Effective project management with Monday

You know you’ve worked hard on creating the most compelling document. But the results of your efforts are not only in what you produce, rather how you strategically deliver those outcomes for clients. Bids and proposals are deadline specific, which means if your process causes delays, you could lose your most trusted customers. What project management tools do for you is establish the foundation of your content creation or business process to ensure a smooth and categorically defined workflow. It keeps your tasks and actions crystal clear and maintains an organised schedule for your projects, no matter the size. 

The goal of project management is to help you remain aligned with your objectives while breaking down the project into specific parameters. What does that mean for you and your team?

That means you can follow the five phases of project management as set out by The Project Management Institute. So technically, you will:

• Initiate
• Plan
• Execute
• Monitor/Control and
• Close projects effectively!

Work management software helps you initiate projects by defining a high-level overview in terms of the project scope. You can then plan key milestones and set bid response dates or timelines accordingly. With added features of monitoring and control, you can execute your projects through dedicated workflows (we love using Workspaces in Monday!) Monday’s boards have certain privileges for owners and members. You can assign team members to specific tasks and view all actions performed on the board. (No, Monday.com is not paying us for marketing, this is all based on what we have been able to do with the platform!)

Tips

• The key to success begins with getting started; do your homework when using any project management software. They have plenty of resources, tutorials and guides that show each process in clear, simple instructions.
• Review and test out the pre-set templates available. This is the best way to learn how to use a board for your unique bid type.
• Select the right viewing mode: You can choose the type of view you’d like to see your data in. Color-coding options make it easier to define stages and task statuses. This is how you can change statuses for each step of your bid creation and management process.
• Create and modify your team’s dashboard: this gives you a bird’s eye view on everything happening so all your projects are in one place for you to manage, supervise and control.

Common pitfalls

• Trying to manage a response without a good project management tool. That’s kind of like riding a bike with only one wheel, it can be done….but it’s unnecessarily hard and risky.
• Thinking you have the whole response period to write your response. You do not.
• Jumping straight into writing and costing: Instead, spend the first 10% of the bid open period carefully reading the request documents and planning your strategy and setting clearly defined milestones and mini-deadlines.
• Counting weekends as response time: A typical 30-day response period is actually only 22 days. Never count weekends in your planning for you or your team. Weekends are important rest periods, use them if you chose to, but not because you have to.
• Only doing one review. Make sure you are setting time aside to review the document as you create it, leaving your review to the very end means you risk being unable to alter or improve content because you’ve run out of time. 

A sneak peek at how Tender Relief uses work management software

We’ve taken it a step further to show you a sample of our Bid Response Board on Monday so you can see our process and how it enables us to perform better.

A final word

Tendering is a pressured environment that can either be measured and calm, or chaotic and stressful. Don’t make it harder for yourself by failing to plan….you know how the old saying goes.

Happy Bidding!