A few days back I had a question from a senior bid writer in a large company. He had been preparing a response to a technical question for a very large Public Sector contract.
He had prepared a response which was pretty good. It covered all the aspects of the question and had some evidence that the proposed approach would work for the client. However, as part of the company’s first draft review process, the draft had been bounced back to him. A Senior Manager had commented that there was insufficient detail. He wanted the bid writer to create the level of detail that would be developed following contract award. This was supposed to give the client comfort that the company could do what was asked. The bid writer came to me and wanted my reaction.
As there was no word count limit and there was plenty of time to prepare a response, it seemed like a reasonable request. But was it?
The questions in this bid were of a form that I have seen emerging in recent large Public Sector bids. The scoring guidance is given and consists of variations on:
- Met fully (10 marks): all sub-criteria a) to h) above are fully evidenced.
- Met partially (7 marks): 7 or more but fewer than 8 of the sub-criteria a) to h) above are fully evidenced.
There was no guidance on what “fully” and “evidenced” actually meant!
At first sight this would appear to be a cunning plot to allow the evaluator to award any marks they wanted, by just recording they were satisfied (or not) with the “evidence”. However, within Sixfold we see it as our role to remove ambiguity in responding to an ITT. We exist to provide advice that, if followed, could be used to determine the outcome of a challenge in our favour in a court. We need to consider the implications of this change in approach to evaluating our bids.
To return to our original dilemma: does a more detailed technical solution and description meet the “fully evidenced” requirement? I think not.
Interestingly, the marking criteria does not set out to measure the quality of the solution. However, we would be foolish to provide an inadequate description. An evaluator must have confidence that the solution will work for this contract. If that is in doubt, then any evidence may not be considered as relevant. Nevertheless, I can see the grounds for a future court challenge to some award decision on the basis that the scoring criteria were met but with an “inadequate” technical solution.
So, part of the response should be a complete description of the technical solution. The description must provide a “reasonable” level of detail to show all elements of the solution have been weighed and considered (reasonable from the viewpoint of an evaluator). However, detail beyond that point is probably unnecessary and will bore the evaluator. Bored evaluators are likely to skip lumps of text. They may miss information more relevant to your scoring.
At this point we have only laid the groundwork for the “fully evidenced” response. We have not scored a single point within the new scoring system.
The traditional way to provide “evidence” in a bid is to follow a solution description with a statement of where it has been done before and the success that ensued. Even better is to say where we have done it before and to quantify the success. However, when the scoring system only measures “fully evidenced”, the implications are that this will not be adequate to guarantee full marks.
My view is that to guarantee maximum scores, the evidence section of every response must deal with the balance between risks and benefits. Any proposed solution will have many risks. For me, this self-evident truth must be tackled head-on and the risks laid out in the response.
The discussion in the text can be about how these risks were overcome in a contract elsewhere. It can include the history of similar work and the feedback from clients. Then it needs to lay out how this approach will work for this client in this contract. The “huge” benefits for the client can then be set out with the mitigations should the risk not be avoided.
For me, this focus on risks and benefits is much more important than increased levels of solution detail. It can be expected that this will take more pages than the solution description. However, if each risk element of every solution part is adequately covered in this manner, maximum marks would have to be awarded under this scoring scheme.
This approach has the added benefit in that it brings in all the traditional evidence points we usually try to include. It makes them more relevant to the solution and the client. Plus, it provides that all-important “demonstration of understanding” of the client’s environment and its concerns. All this leads to a warm and cosy feeling about our bid in the mind of the evaluator.
Is this easy to do? It is not! My recommendation is to start with the highest scoring questions and plan the response structure well before writing starts. The writers must have a very clear idea of the risks, benefits and justifications for the chosen solution for this part of the bid. Time spent in brainstorming these at the outset is more valuable than writing days. Writing is much easier if the authors know what to write.
Should you ever end up in a court in the unlikely situation of arguing over the adequacy of a score, I expect your case would be much easier to prove if this approach has been followed. If you would like any more details of this approach or if you have been cheated of a contract you should have won through an evaluator mistake, we would love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to contact Sixfold on 01227 860375 for a no-obligation chat.
