Practice management - Tender traps
Briefs … Pre-Qualification Submissions … Bid Specifications … Invitations To Tender. Whatever they’re called, their arrival in a consultancy office provokes two reactions. Excitement at the prospect of more revenue, and gloom at the prospect of writing yet another proposal.
In my imagination, there is – somewhere between the M25 and Penge – a clean, strip-lighted place where clerks spend their days creating ITT documents.
The walls of the office are decorated with notices about clear desks and no smoking. A paper-recycling bin stands by every desk.
Around the office, in rows of committee rooms, clusters of staff add pages of broad principles, load extra requirements on to tenderers and check phrasings for political propriety. And down a side corridor, queues shuffle around photocopy machines. Each shuffler holds sheaves of triplicated pages from previous ITTs, and swaps pages at random with neighbours in the queue. By the front door is a rack of policy guideline brochures and charters; a sign exhorts staff: “Be safe. Keep your distance.”
Fancifulness apart, typical ITT processes do have worrying effects.
Arm’s-length rules – which may specify no contact before the bid, or may insist that all questions and answers go to all bidders – are clearly designed to avoid cosiness and the whiff of corruption, but the client may get an inappropriate approach and less valuable results.
Similarly, bland language and all-encompassing specifications do nothing to help either side focus on the real issues in a project. Complicating the selection process (so that tenderers have to jump through hoops) adds to consultants’ costs, which in time get added to clients’ fees. And, in any case, a formal ITT does not guarantee a level playing field; we have all seen ITTs whose decision criteria appear to be skewed to favour a particular candidate.
What seems to drive these unhelpful habits is largely fear: the fear in the ITT drafters’ minds of getting something wrong; and a fear in their bosses’ minds of being seen to oppose a process which looks squeaky-clean.
Perhaps, as consultants, we should dare to take a lead against this sort of nonsense by declining to tender in the dark at all. Done sensitively – perhaps along the lines of … “Rather than run the risk of wasting your money by doing the wrong job or a less-than-outstanding job for you, we’d rather not bid at all” – a straight-talking rejection will leave the door usefully open for future work.
It can work better than that, too. An engineering consultancy tried such a response to a public sector tender a couple of months ago. Last week, I heard from an excited partner that their letter had lifted them over a field of 90 to the final six.
Tony Scott, an independent consultant, specialises in businesses whose product is knowledge.
