Working on tender documents can be extremely stressful, especially as you’ll no doubt have several jobs running all at the same time. How can you alleviate some of this stress?
Establish key milestones.
What you need to establish are key milestones/tender deadlines these will be your starter for 10. Knowing your tender deadline and working back from it, will help create a critical path to success. You will need to allow for collating information, proofreading, and quality control. Ensure you understand all the deliverables required; What format is stated? Do you need to send hard copies? Now for the doing, think about your design template, allow for print management and delivery these are all critical factors which if not allowed for can soon eat into valuable time. I would recommend setting deadlines for all of the above. You will be surprised by how much you have, but a word of warning….it soon flies by and you don’t want to be playing catch up.
Don’t risk missing a deadline.
Working on your to-do list can take some time but fail to plan then plan to fail. Of course, you don’t want to be spending too long on this as you’ll already working on projects, contracts or other submissions. Missing milestones will create a domino effect, and as a result, all your planning will go out of the window and consequently your submission is now at risk. Working under unnecessary pressure will cause you to make mistakes, so be sure to make a start something is better than nothing, beg steal or borrow from sources like previous tenders, interesting articles or just a good old-fashioned brain dump. From here you have a building block and will begin to identify gaps in your bid.
Tenders & bids are here to test you
Projects like this will test you, it’ll test your patience, your level-headed approach, problem-solving skills, communication skills and IT skills for when things go awry; and they will believe me, they will! I am talking from experience here when everything is ready 30mins before the deadline, but the portal is not working properly because your computer thinks is a good time to update! In short, test and allow for submission well ahead of schedule, often you can upload documents right up to the deadline so make sure you are ready.
How to deal with tender deadlines?
To help deal with tender deadlines, I would suggest establishing all key deliverables. Divide and conquer approach. Break all the information into small groups if you are working with a team delegate, if not, dedicate specific time in a day to deal with each section. Leave windows for delays and troubleshooting. If you wonder how big of a window, I will say one day minimum more for any print management but it’s entirely up to you. You know what works best for your schedule.
Delegate or ask for help
If you feel like it is just too much, ask for help, whether it’s your team or someone like us, what matters is it needs to be done. Don’t wait until three days before the deadline in the hope that you will miraculously put something together. Planning is key.
Working on tenders, proposals and pitch decks takes time, time that you may not necessarily have because you are already busy. What we give companies who come to us is peace of mind and restful night’s sleep, so they don’t have to worry about yet another deadline, yet another pitch or tender. We relieve the stress, time constraints and fears for our clients. They know us well, and they know we are an experienced team who knows what goes into a tender or pitch proposal.
If you feel like you could use some help getintouch@formatdesign.com (Don’t worry your email won’t go into a box of never answered emails all enquiries go to everyone in the team)
