A complete pipeline of upcoming staff agency contracts in UK local government.

We often bid for government work ourselves and have found, over time, that the key to a successful bid process is effective communication, something that can be harder than you anticipate when working across departmental and regional boundaries.

We’ve started using Basecamp (www.basecamp.com) to manage our bids and we thought we’d share how we use the tool and the benefits it brings. Its worth mentioning a little bit about Basecamp, although it is billed as a project management tool, it feels more like a collaborative communication tool to us. What it does best is to centralise all the communications between a team and then channel those communications to the individual tasks in a project. This makes it perfect for managing a bid, especially across teams working in different locations. Basecamp also allows for individuals from different organisations to be included on a project so sub-contractors and lawyers can also get involved in any bid.

Defining tasks
Our first action is to add the key dates to Basecamp’s calendar, giving everyone a clear view of the time constraints involved in the tender. The next thing we do is to break down the whole bid into a series of distinct tasks. Doing this job thoroughly and precisely is the most important part of working with Basecamp, missing out key elements can have severe consequences later on. We usually break down the tasks in four main groupings as follows: Compliance, Response, Sub-contracting,  and Submission.

Compliance covers legals, approvals and any other pieces of attending documentation that are required for the bid, e.g. indemnity insurance certificates or questions to the buyer. Our Response tasks detail each of the questions requiring a response for the tender. Sub-contracting covers any communication or tasks that are specific to working with sub-contractors and finally the Submission list lays out all the tasks relating to compiling, formatting and publishing our tender submission.

Writing good tasks
Recently we’ve been focussing on trying to make our task list as precise as possible, so we’re trying to get away from writing up imprecise tasks like “Indeminity Insurance Certs”. Instead we’re trying to make our communications more effective, so we split the task down “Check indemnity insurance is compliant”, “Check indemnity insurance renewal dates” and “Upload Indemnity Insurance Certs”. This level of precision requires an up-front time investment but it means that we’re much more prepared and always completely aware of what is left in order to get our submission done.

Discussions
Basecamp offers the chance to run discussions against any task, uploaded file or calendar event. It also has the ability to create general discussions for the whole project. We use the general discussions to consider ‘global issues’  such as which lots we will bid for, with task and document discussions for the nitty gritty associated with getting approvals. Task discussions are actually where we do the drafting of our responses, as one person can submit the copy they want to see in a response and then invite others to comment. This prevents a situation where a bid writer or manager is holed up for days writing a full first draft before anyone else reviews or responds on anything. Breaking down each response into a task allows other team members to comment on every bit of copy as soon as it is written. Team members can check and review our submission on a daily or even hourly basis, senior staff are more involved and they can build their reviews into their working days rather than having to carve out time to review a full draft.

Compiling our submission
As individual responses are refined, they are added to a Basecamp text document, again this can be the subject of further discussion if you want, but we prefer to just use this tool as a compiler for the final document. Once we’ve compiled all of the completed material, we can output the text file to a proper word processing package for proofing, formatting and presentation. We’ve consciously decided against using document mark-up at an early stage, that’s because its rubbish if you’re making wholesale changes to a document, we only use it when changes are small and limited (every ten words or so).

Benefits
Working on bids with Basecamp has given us some interesting benefits, firstly its easier to involve more people earlier in the process, so we take fewer wrong turns during our bidding. Secondly, everyone can easily see what needs to be done by when. This puts an end to some of the more unrealistic expectations especially when there are multiple bids to submit over a short timeframe. Finally, everything gets securely held in one place, where it can be accessed by anyone working on the bid.

So, if you’re looking for a bid management tool that covers the basics of getting everyone to input and submit a bid on time, you should definitely look at Basecamp.

Caveats
We should also mention that Basecamp isn’t a complex bid management tool, if your bid is so large and unwieldy that you can’t do the pricing on a spreadsheet, then Basecamp probably isn’t for you. We tend to work on research and professional services bids, so that are usually fairly straightforward, so it is perfect tool that makes managing a bid much, much easier.

Government organisations don’t compete, so there is nothing stopping them sharing information and opinions about their suppliers. This can be difficult if you’re the type of supplier who is inclined to say one thing to one customer and a different thing to another customer.

If this is what you like doing, don’t be surprised if you lose your position of trust as a result.

We’re aware of a large services company that has been less than consistent with their messages in one area of government. Their name is mud.

Their team is viewed not just with mistrust, but contempt.

Their failure to be straight is being reported and shared at the highest levels of procurement profession in government. The repercussions could be far greater than the small amount of business at stake when they decided to be economical with the truth.

It takes no time at all to gather a poor reputation, and there is nothing a public sector procurement professional likes more than handing out a lesson to a supplier who has fallen short.

Probity and openness isn’t something to be costed into your approach when doing business in government, it is utterly essential. If you can’t be consistent, honest and open to scrutiny, don’t do business with government.

If my post here doesn’t put you off, then your next step is to understand how government buys.

There’s plenty of pretty ordinary advice published by government (sorry but they don’t do really useful advice) which you can access.

If you wade through all of this you’ll pick up the intricacies about what rules government has to abide by when spending money.

Yes, it is a pain, but no, there is no shortcut, you have to know how this process works, if you don’t know, the buyer will think you’re not serious, because the process is king.

Did you get that? The process is king, that is the most important thing for you to remember. You can forget how long an OJEU process takes to run, but you can’t ever forget that the process is paramount and you won’t get anywhere by ignoring the process.

For the people who think that there must be some sort of secret way to get around the process and get straight to the top-table, you’re not really thinking this through are you? No one wants to give you business without going through the process. The process is how buyers exercise control, it’s how they make sure that their career doesn’t get panned, it’s how they get good prices.

That’s the reason why the process is king, all the benefits of using the process fall to the buyer, why would they give away their advantage to you?