Striking Project Management
Project Management Consulting
Welcome. Watch the recorded How to Win Tenders Webinar below.
I recently gave a masterclass on winning tenders where I share some of the secrets to a great tender response. This video will demonstrate how to win tenders.
Due to popular demand, I have decided to share this with the visitors to my website. I share a few things I know about winning tenders and proposals. Knowledge that has been gained over a 15 year career as a project manager.
During this career as a project manager, I have issued and evaluated millions of dollars worth of tenders, and I can say without a doubt that most tender submissions fail to hit the mark.
I hope you enjoyed the How to Win Tenders Webinar. If you would like to discover more and register your interest to the Advanced Winning Tenders Workshop then please register now. Remember, this is a limited offer and I will only be running this workshop if there is sufficient interest.
Chris: Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning this webinar. I know it’s a Friday afternoon and you’ve all dedicated your beer time to this, so I’ll make it quick. I’ll do my best to add some value and I really hope that you’ll be able to put some of the action steps from this video, or this webinar, into action and, hopefully, win a lot more tenders than ever before.
The premise of this webinar is secrets to winning tenders, even if you have never tendered before. What I hope to show you is just give you some inside tips and secrets of what I look for in tender responses and also what the tender evaluation panel is looking to see. We’ll get straight into it.
What I’ll be covering in this session is I’ll give you a bit of
I know a lot of you will be thinking that tendering is hours and hours of work, and it can be, but, with some of these strategies, hopefully you’ll be able to keep that down to a minimum.
I’ll go through some of the key criteria that you really need to look at and make sure you nail it down because they’re really the key selection criteria that you must get right. I’ll also go through some of the common mistakes that I see quite often. If you can avoid these, you’ll also reduce some significant penalties. I’ll share some tips that will help you win, these are my big secrets, and a little bit of resources. Maybe you can find some additional resources that will help you in your tendering success.
Just a bit about me, so you know where I’m coming from, I own a project management company called Striking Project Management. I have an office in Brisbane and Shanghai. Basically, I sit on the client’s side. That means that, in that role, I’m helping the client to get the best value for the money in their project. That starts with early planning of their project, putting together the scope document, looking at how we are going to procure it, whether it be through a tender process or an RFQ, and then right through to delivery and hand over. It’s the procurement process where I’m going to focus on tonight, in this webinar. Obviously, a key impact in that procurement process is the tender evaluation. I’ll speak a little bit more on this later, why this is so important.
We work with small- to medium-sized businesses and larger governments. A lot of our SME work is in helping them structure their project management systems through our project management consulting services and delivering project management services on their behalf. With that client-side work, I have had a lot of experience in the tender evaluation, particularly both chairing the panel and designing the tender responses. Typically, the project manager plays a fairly key role in the tender process.
I’ve been involved in about $35 million worth of projects, both small, a couple of hundred thousand dollar projects, right up to tens of millions of dollars’ worth of projects.
Why am I sharing this information? Well, basically, there are a lot of tenders out there that just really don’t hit the mark. It doesn’t do me any favors on the client side and it certainly doesn’t do you guys any favors by not getting it right. Basically, all I want to see is the best company delivering the work for my client. From what I see, most companies are good at what they do. They just don’t demonstrate it in their tender response. The other side is maybe a little bit selfish, in that I hope that if you win a tender, you might call me to help you with your project management side in delivering that project for that tender. It’s a bit of a two-sided coin there. If not, I know that my clients will get a better result and hopefully I might get some business out of it.
Now a view of the tender opportunity. Basically, we look at there are huge opportunities in federal tenders. By that, we’re looking at the main government, top tenders, things like your AusTender, eTender portals. There’s stuff that handle direct government and they can be:
You see this a lot in commercial cleaning, advertising, construction. They all tender out for these larger projects.
Now, if we talk strategy in tendering, basically what we want to try to do is plan tenders in advance. I know most people get onto a tender quite late. They normally have two to three weeks putting a tender response. To be honest, that’s not enough time. What you can do, especially for larger tenders, is look at that six- or 12-month horizon and plan in advance which tenders you’re going to bid for and prepare for those well in advance. What you can actually start doing is pulling together recent relevant information and even resource up for that tender process.
A good tool for this is looking at the forward procurement plans. You’ll see these on most of the government websites. Go through the tendering portal and look for procurement policies, forward procurement plans. They call them different terms on different websites but if you look for something around “procurement planning” and “forward procurement planning,” you’ll get a long-term view of what tenders are in the pipeline. These will be broken down by category. It could be an IT project and it might say, “In 24 months we’ll be looking at rolling out a new SAP system,” or, “The current commercial cleaning contract is due to expire in eight months and that will be rereleased,” or it could be a new panel of providers being raised in six months. This gives you a fairly good indication of the upcoming tenders.
What you can then do is start to plan these ones out. You don’t want to bid for all tenders in the same month because, if you get them all, if you win them all, you’ll be in a lot of trouble trying to resource up and deliver them. You’re much better off picking one, two, three strategic tenders that you know you need to win or you must win and really putting in a great response for those. Then, you can do a couple of others in between those. You don’t want to be in a position yourself where you can’t deliver on the tenders you put forward. Once you put together your tender responses, and I’ll go through some of this tonight, basically most of it will be standard documentation. What you want to try to get to is a point where you have 70% of your tender documentations ready to go and that’s through having standard templates, standard response questions pre-prepared and really have this tender portfolio ready to go.
You want to target only relevant tender opportunities. If you’re a construction specialist, don’t go looking at an IT project, for example. If you specialize in residential construction, don’t put in a bid for commercial. You’re not helping yourself. You need to only go with relevant tender opportunities. You’re far better off to wait for the right ones and bid on the right ones than trying to put in a response where you don’t have the relevant experience. Even though the aim here is to have 70% of the material pre-prepared, you still need to tailor it all for each tender.
Some of the common mistakes that I see in tender responses is noncompliance. Basically, if the tendering authority wants you to submit two hard copies, one electronic, one in color and one in black and white, you need to do that. Quite often, I’ll see a company that will just submit one tender or send it on a USB stick, even though it’s been requested that it comes in hard copy. Straightaway, if you get a lot of tenders and if you’re trying to evaluate 30 or 40 tenders, you’re just going to call out those nonconforming ones straightaway. It’s simple stuff and a lot of it is commonly missed. Compliance to all the selection criteria is critical and most of the stuff is hidden in plain sight. It will tell you in the tender response requirements, “Submit it on this date, in this format, with this information.”
The next big mistake that I see is tenders failing to demonstrate their capability. What we’ll see is a provider response to the tender questions and responses and they’ll tell us that they can do it but they won’t prove that they can do it. Every time you say that you can do something you need to demonstrate it and you do that by showing relevant examples of how you did in the past, how you would do it for this particular tender, what’s different about the other tenders or what’s different about this tender and how you will change your process to suit this one.
The other one is failing to demonstrate the understanding of the scope of the work of the project. Now, this is a little bit different than capability. In capability, you’re trying to demonstrate that you have the skills and experience to deliver the project. When you’re trying to demonstrate your understanding of the scope, you need to prove to the evaluation panel that you know so much about this type of project that you factored everything in, you understand the project so well. …The least risky tenderer of the evaluation.
Nonconformance submission is another big one. When we say “conforming” and “nonconforming,” a conforming bid is if I ask for a brown table with a black leather insert, for example, but you know that you build white tables with a blue leather insert, a far superior product, in your belief, you might send a tender in for that, a white table with a blue leather insert. That’s what we call a “nonconforming bid.” It doesn’t conform to the requirements of the tender because the tender may have asked for a black table or a brown table with a black leather insert. You need to submit a conforming bid, otherwise the tender evaluation committee cannot evaluate the tender and it will get thrown out as a nonconforming.
Another big mistake is that there’s no innovation in the tender response. It’s a great opportunity to show innovation, how your product or service is better than the competitor’s and demonstrate that. You will get points for innovation in your approach, innovation for your product, and you want to demonstrate that. Now, in order to demonstrate innovation, in most cases, you need to submit a nonconforming bid. It may be slightly different to what they asked for but the result could be a lot better or should be a lot greater value to the client. The important thing when you’re submitting a nonconforming bid or highly innovative approach, you also need to submit a conforming bid. There are two responses then. You submit the conforming bid, as exactly how the client asked for it, and then you might back up and say, “However, we believe we can offer superior value with this nonconforming bid.” That allows a tender evaluation panel to review your bid, the conforming bid, in line with all the others and they can measure apples against apples, and then evaluate, on the basis of innovation, on your nonconforming bid.
Key criteria, again, you need to get all these right in order to win a tender. Number one, as we touched on earlier, compliance, and that is compliance with the response criteria and the submission criteria. Really read through the tender response documents. What I strongly suggest to the clients I work with is that you read through the tender response documents two or three times and then take out an Excel spreadsheet and start writing down all the requirements, everything from due date, how they want the answers responded to, what format, the timing of the project, everything to do with the tenders. Just write it all down and you’ll come with a list and list of a couple pages long of all these key selection criteria. Then, in the next table over, just start writing down some of the support documents that you might be able to submit to demonstrate that. If you can do just that step, you’ll be so far ahead of most other tenders, it won’t be funny.
The next key criterion is to show an understanding of the scope of works. I know in a lot of cases it sounds simple, but if I’m asking you to build me a building that’s going to be 13 stories high and residential in nature, type out half a page explaining some of the material you might use, some of the similar projects that you’ve used, and some of the issues that have occurred on similar projects and how you manage those. Really show a depth and breadth of understanding of the scope of works. Repeat back to me what you believe the project is about. Approach and methodology, this is probably one of the hardest ones to get right. In most tender responses, you’ll have key criteria that ask you to demonstrate your approach to methodology. These are open questions deliberately because we want you to prove to us that you understand how to go about delivering the project and that you can think methodically in your approach. The only way to do that is by not giving you closed questions. Basically, you need to come back and really create a word picture around how you propose to go about delivering this project and how you’re going to keep it on track. You can do this in a number of ways. You can create a series of word pictures or show a Gantt chart. You can show a process flow or a workflow diagram. You can show all three, if that’s required. You can show templates of how you’ve done similar projects of similar scope. You need to walk through, from start to finish, how you’ll go about doing the project and how you’ll go about maintaining its scope and its time and budget constraints.
Risk management is quite often forgotten. It’s a great area to grab extra points. It can be quite a simple process. List out a dozen to two dozen key critical risks that could occur in a project. If you’re experience in that scope of work, you’ll know you’ve got to put this together quite quickly. You may even have it already recorded. Certainly, all my clients do. What you want to do is, again, list some of the key risks that could occur. It doesn’t matter if they don’t or if it’s unlikely. If it’s key risk, put it down. There’s a good chance that the evaluation team, or certainly the project manager, is aware of those risks. If you provide those same risks back, it’s going to show a great level of understanding and it also will support your understanding of the scope of work.
Once you capture those risks, you then also need to document how you’ll mitigate and manage those. This is just in a simple Excel template. What’s the risk, how likely is it to occur, what the impact could be, and how you’ll go about managing that risk.
Value-for-money, most government tendering bodies will tell you they’re after a value-for-money approach. What that means is it gives governments and organizations a bit of flexibility in how they go about their selection criteria. Value-for-money doesn’t mean the cheapest tender bid. Value-for-money does not mean the cheapest tender bid wins. It means the bid that shows the highest value for money. What that is, is normally a way to select some criteria. Money, dollar value, it ranges depending on the project, but it’s normally around 50% or more. The money normally has a 50% weighting but this is, again, very dependent on the project and don’t use that as a gospel. It’s only a guide. Some requests for tenders will actually show you the selection criteria weightings, but if not, if you work 50%, it’s probably not a bad starting point.
You demonstrate value-for-money by really proving that you’re the least risky tenderer. By that, I mean you may not be the cheapest but your response, your approach and methodology, your understanding of the scope, and your risk management all give you higher points and a certainty that you can deliver this project on time and on budget. If you can prove that you offer the least risk to the evaluation committee and if you’re still within the ballpark of price, you’ll certainly be shortlisted. If your price is way out, then you will be discounted because either it was seen that you didn’t understand the scope or you’re pricing into much risk. That’s the same, again, for if your price is too low. You’ll quite often be discounted. I’ve seen some tender evaluations where they discount the highest and the lowest bid or any bid that’s out of a 30% range. Depending on the project, depending on the evaluation committee, you need to be in the ballpark, but certainly you don’t need to be the cheapest.
Quite often, there will be bonus points for innovation. If you can come up with an innovation or an innovative solution, put it in there. It can only increase your score if the tendering body is looking for innovation in their response. If they’re not, you’re still going to get a better score because it only shows that you know what you’re doing. If you can prove that, you’re going to be in a lot better response.
Basically, all these criteria come down to a scoring sheet. They all have different weightings and the total of the scores is how they rank the tenders for value-for-money.
How do we win? That’s the key question. Well, basically, I said it a couple times in this webinar so far. You win by demonstrating that you are the least risk, that your tender is the least risk to the client. You demonstrate a sound methodology. Throughout your entire tender response, you need to prove that you understand how you’ll go about delivering the project. If you can tie it into a project management framework or process, great. If you can tie it back to a best practice or a standard, great. You need to understand the methodology and then prove how you’ll do it and how you’ll keep it on track. You demonstrate understanding of the risks. We talked about this again before. List out the risks. I know it may seem simple, but the fact that you’ve thought about those risks, you’ve planned for those risks, it all shows that you understand the scope, you understand the approach. You’re providing the least risk approach to the market or to the tenderer.
Understanding of scope, you need to tell me that you know what you’re talking about. Tell me that you understand what I’m asking you to apprise. I need confidence that you know what you’re apprising. You do that by showing similar projects that you delivered. Show me that you done an on-time. If you went over time, show me why and show me how you’ve learnt from that experience.
Yes, you want to try to keep your tender responses positive, but if you don’t have a positive demonstrable piece of experience, even if it was slightly negative, but you showed me that you’ve learnt from that and these are the process changes you put in place into your business so it doesn’t happen again, it can only add value. If you haven’t learnt from that experience and you haven’t changed your process, obviously don’t put it in. If you don’t demonstrate any of the key criteria area, you’ll score poorly. In a number of tenders, if there is insufficient information, you’ll fall below the minimum acceptable criteria and you’ll be out automatically.
Unidentified key personnel, this is another one where people tend to shy away from experience. They’ll put in one or two of their own personnel. If they don’t have internal personnel, they’ll tend to shy away and leave this one out. Not having the internal personnel isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It shows far more value if you identify that you don’t have one or two key personnel but then you show me how you’re going to get that key personnel. Maybe that could be through a subcontractor or it could be that you will hire additional staff. It doesn’t really matter. What’s more important is that you’ve identified that skills gap for this particular project and you’re mitigating my risk by finding a suitable candidate. What I think most tender respondents do is they go, “Oh, we don’t have a PRINCE2 project manager, a certified project manager, so we’ll just leave that out,” and that doesn’t do any favors. What they’re better off doing is identifying that they have that gap and saying, “We don’t have a project manager with this capability. However, we will subcontract this component out to Striking Group, for example, who specialize in project management.” That type of answer will get good marks. Then what you do is you go to your subcontractor and you say, “Send me your CV. Show me how you will deliver on this project.” For example, a project manager or any other key personnel, get them involved in the tender process upfront. You want to demonstrate that you can deliver.
For me, as a client-side project manager, all I care about is that I get it delivered on time, I get it delivered on budget, I get it delivered within the quality criteria that’s required, and it meets the needs and the benefits of the business. If I can do that, then I’ve done my job. I’m going to pick the company that is going to assist me to do that. Demonstrate that you can deliver. You do that by demonstrating that you know through your sound approach and methodology, through your understanding of the risks, through your understanding of scope, and your key personnel. All of this ties together into demonstrating that you can deliver. This might be key criteria that you’ll see. This is all stuff that comes through when you combine and read the tender response in its entirety. You study in the sense of who can deliver. How much certainty is there in this contractor that he will deliver on time and on budget?
My last little tip is read between the lines. Sometimes, especially in high-risk tenders or projects, I won’t necessarily tell you what those risks are or what some of the potential issues could be because I want to see if you know what they are. Quite often, it can be a little bit sneaky but read between the lines, try to understand what some of the key risks are for the client, for their business, and for the project, and just think about what are some of the things that they can be concerned about. If you’re building a building, for example, and there’s a new standard coming out in the next couple of months, you may want to identify that you incorporated some of those, what you foresee those changes to be, if you’ve been involved in that panel discussion, or how you will change the plan to suit that new standard if it comes out and if it does impact. Certainly, just try to think about some of the underlying issues that both the project manager and the client could be concerned about.
Just some final resources that you might want to look at. The AusTender website is great for some of the larger federal governments. Most council websites also offer some registration for tenderers online. Also, on these tendering portals, AusTender and the local governments, a lot of them have forward procurement planning policies that you can download. There’s also paid searches. Things like Cordell TendersOnline, TenderLink, eTenders, Tender Bulletins. They’re all basically a paid service. You pay a monthly subscription or an annual subscription and they email you out any relevant tenders that are in your category. It’s all public information anyway. It’s just there are thousands of different points were tenders are released and these guys aggregate them and send them out. If you don’t want to spend the money, you can register at each state, federal, local, on all the respective websites.
Another great resource is local governments. They usually have some great tender schedules and templates for free. If you dig around, some of the governments, SA Government, Brisbane City Council, Victorian government, they have some great tender templates, a free download. Also, another thing to consider is that, quite often, tenders are open publicly. You’re welcome to go along and listen to those opened up. What they’ll actually do is open up each tender. They’ll open up the envelope and they’ll read out who the tenderer is and what their submission bid was. If you’re just starting out, you’re more than welcome to go along and just listen to the tender bids that are opened up and what their prices were. It’s a great bit of market research.
Also, local, state, and federal governments will normally post the winning bid prices on the websites. A couple of months later, you’ll normally find that ABC Company won the bid for $1.2 million. That’s just a good bit of feedback if you did a tender response and your bid was $1.5, then you probably know that you’re a little bit out of the ballpark and you can look at where you could have saved money or where you overpriced risk or anything else in the tender process.
If there are any questions, just please send me an email directly. I can’t seem to get the chat room working up tonight. I’ll post an opportunity where you can send through some questions directly.
If you want to learn anything, go the next step in this, I am considering running an advanced workshop. It’ll probably be a series over six to eight weeks. What we’ll do is probably the same format but I’ll probably open up a chat room forum just so we can continue the questions. It will be an hour to an hour and a half each week, online, delivered like this. I’ll run through all those steps in detail and many more that I didn’t get a chance to cover off tonight. I’ll only do it if there’s significant demand and it warrants it. If you’re interested, just sign up and just leave me your name and email address. If I hit the numbers, I’ll get in touch and we’ll organize it.
As I said, I will go deep into each key selection criteria, how you could answer it, some of the example demonstration criteria you may want to submit, and some key things to think about in that’s selection criteria. The key point is I’ll show you how to demonstrate everything. I’ll show you what you need to submit in your tender, what it needs to look like, how it needs to be formatted, and how you prove to be the least risky tender submission. If you can get that right, you’ll be in a very good position to win tenders. Like I say, once we’ve done this once, you’re 70% there for all future tenders. You just take that same information and put it in. You may tweak it for different projects, but for all intents and purposes, you’ll have this portfolio of tendered documents that you can just submit.
It will be interactive weekly sessions. You’ll get out what you put in. Given that it’s interactive weekly sessions, I will keep it restricted to, I’m not sure of the numbers yet, maybe 10 or 20 people. I’ll keep it quite small so I can field questions directly on the night. Again, it will be through an online delivery. If you’re interested, I’ll put up a link and just let me know via email if you want or wait for the link to come up. As I say, I may not do it. I’ll only do it if I get enough numbers that warrants it.
I hope you’ve got some value out of tonight. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a lot of time to go really deep into some of the topics but I really did share with you some of the most important factors, I think. If you get those right, you will be well and truly underway to tender success. Like anything, I hope you put it into practice and I hope you win from it.
You can get in touch with me through Twitter @StrikingGroup. As for my website, it’s StrikingProjectManagement.com. Email me directly [email protected]. Thanks for listening and I’ll speak to you soon.
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I'm "Chris O". I've managed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of projects since the inception of my career. I love helping others figure out the intricacies of project management on any scale. Come find me on twitter or google+
hello chris, I enjoyed your webinar, thankyou. I would like to register my interest further, more detailed workshops.
kind regards
marko basanovic
Hi Marko,
Thanks for your kind comments. It took quite some time to put it together, it’s great to hear you found value in it!
The workshop is not quite ready, but I am taking on some clients on a 1 by 1 basis. Let me know if you would like to chat further. You can reach me on [email protected]
Thank you very much for your Webinar. I am in the process of preparing a tender submission for ICT Project Management services and I found your information to be very helpful and practical. If I am able to win the contract I will let you know as your input was really worth while.
Hi David,
Thanks for that great feedback. If you need any further advice, I am happy to spend 30 mins over Skype with you for your kind words.
send me an email to [email protected] to organise.
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I am very impressed by the presentation. I haven’t done any project so far but I am willing to be to some soon.
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[…] I am constantly asked to help clients and business in their tender writing, so I have decided to create a live webinar absolutely free, so that we can go a little deeper and share some of the inside strategies, tips and techniques to winning tenders. The recorded webinar can be found here Secrets to winning tenders webinar […]
[…] to put together a strong tender response. This especially applies for large tenders; some industry experts suggest that it’s best to give yourself a 6-12 months head start. This should be adequate to not […]
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