Jean Roberts

Treat Tendering as a Core Business Function

As you move into the task of preparing a tender, you will soon realise the nature and range of skills you will need to call upon – either from yourself or from your colleagues or team members. 

 This is a brief introduction:

Organisational analysis and review

• knowing and understanding your organisation’s ability, maturity, capability and willingness to fulfil or achieve the project

Planning and policy development

• positioning the project within the strategic and policy framework of your organisation

Needs assessment

• expressing and validating the nature and scope of the need, problem or opportunity to be addressed by the project

Decision-making

• following a consistent decision-making style, particularly in relation to criteria for the assessment of options and implications during the project development stage: the issues of risk avoidance, risk management and quality control are dependent on consultative yet incisive decision-making

Negotiation

• presenting and protecting the interests, integrity and credibility of your organisation and yourself

Administration

• administering the processes, procedures and systems involved in the development of the project and preparation of the tender document

Networking

• keeping in touch with what’s going on in your industry or sector, including locating opportunities to tender, monitoring the initiatives among competitors, establishing formal linkages, networks and strategic alliances with reliable collaborators

Selling your ideas

• explaining your ideas convincingly and gaining commitment to them from people who will be involved with or affected by the project in the event of winning the tender

Personnel management

• getting the best out of the people involved, both internal and external people: very often this requires motivating your team members to ‘go the extra mile’ for you and for the tender by working harder and faster as the deadline approaches

Financial management

• appreciating and protecting all components of the project budget in the interests of your organisation and in fairness to the tender caller

Evaluation and review

• fully understanding and appreciating the importance of  evaluation and review, scheduling appropriate procedures in the project implementation and including allowances in the project budget

Technical Writing

• the skill of moving from a first-draft through to a crafted, clear, concise document capable of setting before the assessors a positive, powerful and persuasive case – with at the very least every question specifically addressed, every statement or claim explained and verified, every budget line-item validated, every attachment appropriate introduced in the body of the document, addressing every assessment criteria, and meeting every compliance or conformance requirement… technical writing for sure!

If you and your team are in the business of preparing tenders on a regular basis, these basic skills should be included in the your performance appraisal – and included in the training plans for relevant members of management or staff.

Where a regular time allotment is given to writing tenders, this responsibility should appear in the position descriptions of relevant staff as a distinct area of responsibility.

It’s not uncommon to see preparation of tenders treated as an ‘extra’ - over and above a regular workload, and receiving little or no formal recognition as to competency or performance.

Preparation of tenders needs to be seen as a core competency - and this is more likely to happen if tendering itself is treated as a core business function.