All Bids Should Have – A Bid Plan

A Simple Super Basic Fundamental That All Bids Should Have – A Bid Plan

Make sure you've got a robust bid plan in play on your bid. Whether you're a professional bidding person or whether you're going it alone or working in a smaller business that doesn't have bidding professionals – an absolutely critical enabler when it comes to successful bidding is having a bid plan.

A bid plan is your project execution plan for the bid. It should be your single source of data and planning when it comes to your bid. We have a template for it in the bid toolkit that you can find here.

It should contain a list of all the activities – in effect a work breakdown structure of all the deliverables that you need to deliver with who's accountable for each item as the leader, any supporting people that are going to help them with it, and the timelines of when that content needs to be reviewed and completed.

It should set out a roadmap of your reviews. Your pink review, green review, and red review of your quality submission, or whatever you do in terms of quality gateway reviews. It's quite important that we try and make sure people are in the right direction when it comes to their content, that they're going to make it in terms of hitting their deadlines, etc. Whoever's playing the role of the bid manager should touch base with the different people involved in the bid and temperature check - are they going to be able to hit those deadlines, etc, against the plan as well as holding them to account in regular bid team catch up meetings.

It is important that we break down large tasks into manageable pieces and perhaps create sub tasks for those. We don't want to leave anybody holding the baby alone or left to eat an elephant, as we say. Let’s make sure that we do a good job resourcing things thoughtfully and effectively breaking tasks down. We can then do a drop line through the bid, holding people to account that they're going to meet those deadlines.

Control of the bid plan is key. The only one person who should change it is the bid manager. We shouldn't have anybody else going in there and dilly dallying with any of the content in it, dates, etc. It should be reviewed regularly, distributed regularly, and worked on. If you're into that kind of bidding, you could even submit the heart of it as a compliance matrix your bid to show the client that you're compliant and where to find particular pieces of content, with page numbers of where to flick to and perhaps a little comment that's nicely spun on what's in that section.  

It's up to you, but fundamentally, you need that project management tool in the short all action period of a bid. Have a bid plan that lists out who's doing what, by when, and perhaps a directory of people working on the bid, particularly if you've got external people involved. These days, you may well be managing the bid in a teams site or similar, with the bid plan hosted at the heart of that - but have a bid plan, one version of the truth. Use that as your tool for managing the thing.