2 min read

I love a good research project. One minute I am curious about how bees are important for cross pollination, the next minute I am spiralling into an internet void reading multiple articles on the subject, and wondering what happened to the last three hours of my life?

And to compile a winning tender for a client, I will commit wholeheartedly to doing the research and digging through a trove of tender documentation to pull together and recraft the information required to draft a compelling response. But research takes time, and if you are working on a time limited tender, time is a commodity you unfortunately do not have.

Having an external consultant filter through your company files and previous tender submissions looking for information that you intrinsically know is saved somewhere in “xyz” location, is not getting the most value out of their services for you. Although we are willing, we know the clock is ticking.

Very commonly, files are not accurately named, or document controlled with correct revisions, can contain conflicting or old information, or you just know you have seen an updated version of that document somewhere. Now where was that? Did we use that in that Tender we did 8 weeks ago?

My advice to save time and get your tender writer reading your relevant documents and crafting you a compliant and compelling response is to:

• Put the source files you would like them to use into a “working folder”. Having all the source documents in one easy location will save valuable time sifting through your files

• Organise the source documents into sub working folders as per their returnable schedule. If returnable schedule 2 is based on Health and Safety, put all the relevant health and safety files into a “RS2 Working” folder

• Take the time to consider the source material that will be most useful to respond to the specific questions you are being asked. More is not always more. Providing a copy of all your organisations Health and Safety information may not be helpful in providing the information required to answer what is specifically being requested of you for this tender, and

• Provide a framework in your draft response which references the documents your tender writer can refer to find additional information. Your tender writer will be able to achieve much more for you reviewing a document which is relevant to the response, than they would reviewing several documents looking for something as a basis to draft your response.

Don’t get stung using up your valuable tender time recreating the research wheel. Give your tender writers a bee line to the relevant information they need to do the best tender writing for you and keep your tender team busy bees!