There are clear advantages to be gained from treating the quality management of the bid as a continuous procedure built into its development from the start. It is important to check the bid thoroughly for the accuracy of its response to the client’s priorities and for its completeness and quality of presentation – and to do this systematic- ally throughout the process of writing the bid, not just at a concluding review stage. Your chances of success may well depend on getting small details right. The production timetable may allocate time at the end of the process for the text and graphics to be reviewed before the definitive version is printed out, but experience shows that if this is left until late the time available can easily be consumed by other pressures: in the worst cases, bids can leave the office unchecked, so that the first person to spot an obvious error is the client.
Quality management has three aspects. The first is strategic – ensuring that:
n whatever requirements the client has expressed about the content, structure and submission of the bid are recognized and observed; n the client’s view of the contract has been properly understood and
reflected in the bid;
n the text responds accurately to the wording used by the client in setting out detailed requirements for information;
n the information supplied by the client has been used efficiently in constructing the bid;
n the text puts forward a balanced approach to the work;
n the basis on which the price of the work is calculated matches accurately the proposed technical input.
The second aspect is tactical – detecting and correcting omissions, factual mistakes, word processing errors, miscalculations, misspellings, inconsistencies in layout and so forth. Search for mistakes, check points of detail fastidiously, and take nothing for granted. For example: n Is all the material that the client requires in the submission finalized
and in place?
n Have the correct templates and schedules been used – for example, in setting out work activities, costs and personnel?
n Is one person shown in the work programme as performing two full-time activities simultaneously?
n Are two people claiming credit in their CVs for identical project responsibilities?
n Are all the CVs in place, and in the order that corresponds to the team listing in the text or CV index?
n If the text includes tables and graphics, are they properly cross- referenced in the text?
n Do the numbers in tables add up correctly and tally with informa- tion given elsewhere in the text?
n Are graphics in the right places and the right order and consistent with the text? Do they have the right captions?
n Is the client’s name spelt correctly? Contracts have been lost in situations where it was not.
It is always useful to have the text and graphics looked through by someone who was not involved in preparing the bid but knows its subject and context well enough to spot points that may seem question- able or need clearer explanation or more substantiation, or statements that the client is likely to misunderstand. One critical task is ensuring that the production schedule for the bid graphics is able to accommo- date any late changes in the proposed work programme, team compo- sition, time inputs or price schedule.
Third, there is what may be termed the competitive aspect of qual- ity management. Does the document have the necessary ingredients to make it a convincing and successfully competitive bid – insight and penetration, creativity and innovation, energy and enthusiasm, in addition to value for money and technical confidence? Does it express the message that your bid offers a distinctive added value that clients will not be able to obtain from your competitors?
If you maintain a protected text of the bid, as advocated above, keep it in a directory or folder accessible to everyone with an interest in the contract. This allows the progress and quality of the bid to be moni- tored throughout its development, so that managers can read the text at any time, suggest any necessary changes in direction early in the day and reduce the possibility of encountering disagreeable surprises at the last minute.
Some firms use what is termed a ‘red team’ to review the bid when it is close to a final draft. The job of this team is to read through the bid critically as if they were the client’s evaluation panel, checking to see how competently it meets the requirements of the contract and how fully it matches the client’s evaluation criteria. They adopt a devil’s advocate role, challenging the thinking in the bid, searching for weaknesses and inconsistencies, and suggesting how the shortcomings they find in the text can be put right.
Though one cannot fault the principle of examining the bid from the client’s perspective, the red team procedure is no substitute for a continuous quality review. First, if the people making up the team are sufficiently informed about both the client’s view of the contract and its technical content to play a red team role effectively, they might be better employed providing original input to the bid rather than commenting at a distance and at a stage when it might be difficult to accommodate their changes coherently. Second, maintaining this
review team will probably be cost-effective only on bids for particularly high-value contracts. Third, experience shows that ‘us and them’ tensions can easily build up between the people writing the bid and the people on the red team, especially if no one on that team takes the trouble to discuss the reasons why a particular approach was taken. Red teams should not just ‘red-pen’ the text: if they think something is inadequate they have a responsibility to put forward a better solution.