Is there an “Us” and “Them” in your bid team? It can be hard to create one winning spirit in a bid team, where everyone visibly lines up with equal enthusiasm against the goal. As a bid team member it can be upsetting and frustrating if others don’t seem to be working as hard as you. As the Bid Director,…
Do you have experience of corrosive conflict in bid teams? Here’s a brief quiz for December! Was it: (A) Put under the carpet. In other words, it was denied that the conflict existed, had any impact on the team or the bid outcomes. (B) The precursor to aggression. Of course people are polite first. When all else fails, aggression is justified…
Multiple grey headed white men, including quite a few Bid Directors, were told time and time again about the need for greater diversity in rail infrastructure at a High Speed 2 conference I recently attended. (HS2 will be the largest infrastructure project in Europe, taking high speed rail to the north of England, increasing speed and capacity). It was a…
Is your Bid Production process neat and aligned like this sushi, with your bid perfectly finished and ready to go? In the final stages of a large bid, although we might fantasise about the component parts all turning up complete and on time, the documentation team merely doing final checks to bring everything together, the finance team simply carrying…
As the bid leader, whether you like it or not, you are the bid personality and set the tone. You do this as you stand up at the team brief, when you walk round the office to get some water, as you enter the board room for the review meeting. You are always on show and the “can do”,…
“I’m currently sitting on 4 tenders, all of which are 40,000 – 80,000 word responses, all of which need a fairly large piece of estimation and I’m the bid team, pretty much the whole bid team.” This comment was made to me by a bid professional recently. He was finding it hard to sympathise with the challenges of leading a…