Details Matter: Understanding RFT Deliverables for Actionable Results
Nicole McIntyre, Submissions Manager for Built and an APMP member, transformed an accidental career into a passionate calling. With extensive experience in bid management, she excels at crafting compelling narratives and navigating the intricate landscape of tender submissions.
Learning the Tender Landscape: A Personal Journey
When I started working in tenders over a decade ago, it was only meant to be for maternity cover for the better part of a year, but I was bitten by the bug and have stuck with it ever since.
Submissions and the act of working on them speak to my love for storytelling, both in the written form and visual form. When I started, though, I was shipped off to a day-long training session on how to use InDesign, and it didn’t quite stick as the day was rushed, and my learnings atrophied from lack of use. These obstacles didn’t deter me, however, as I learned by doing, and it’s [the doing that’s] the best way to really hone your skills as you’re very quickly forced to get yourself out of tricky situations. Otherwise, it’s a late tender, and I know we’ve all been there, am I right, Will?
That being said, let’s start with the anecdotal take: I once worked on a must-win tender that came with prescriptive evaluation criteria, and in retrospect, it was a cake walk as compared to the evaluation criteria and returnables we now see. Shifting market demands, client desires, throw in a Pandemic, and reduced appetites for risk: dotting i’s and crossing t’s are the bedrock for bid management, because if we get the deal wrong, whether it be through price, program, team, experience — or lack thereof — contract departures, value proposition, strategy, etc., then what the heck are we even doing here? Well, I’m glad you asked or wondered.
Briefly going back to that ‘must-win’ tender, without betraying probity, I’ll give you some colour and context about the opportunity. It was a multi-storey fitout with essential base build upgrades as the client would soon be the building’s anchor tenant in a squat commercial office development located in an Australian-CBD fringe suburb.
The Expression of Interest was a success, and the client was ‘interested,’ so much so that we made it through to the RFT phase. Cool. The thing is, the tender landed during my first six months as a fill-in Bid Coordinator, which meant I didn’t know what I didn’t know – it was a perfect storm of a tender mixed with lack of experience, naivety, and being satisfied that we had already delivered on what the client already wanted to see in our EOI.
Why am I focusing on this tender specifically? Well, it was high stakes for me and the organisation I was working for at the time, and I’ve left the best bit until the end of our story time. The submission came in at a whopping 30 pages. How can this be? We answered everything in the schedules, but I missed the ‘cake walk’ evaluation criteria I previously mentioned in the invitation to tender, which meant so many opportunities were missed in satisfying what the client wanted to see in the offer. From memory, I was given a stern talking to and I learned a valuable lesson: to be across not only the schedules, but also the Invitation to Tender (ITT) / Request for Tender (RFT) and the Principal Project Requirements, as sometimes clients do define additional returnable requirements here as well.
The failure of the bid wasn’t solely on me; the Bid Manager had a role to play in not looking at the submission until after it was lodged with the client. Call it complacency, not being across the detail of the bid itself, and instead focusing on how we were going to manoeuvre our way through an operational environment, as I recall this being a large consideration needing to be addressed in the methodology, and we did. Collectively, we let ourselves down and from then on, I knew to be across the detail instead of sitting in the periphery. Story time over.
From Missed Opportunities to Winning Strategies
The first order of business when documents land: file, disseminate, review, and then meet as a team to run through an opportunity. Following that, complete your own due diligence by reading through preamble documentation, even if it’s a cursory flick through to understand the quantum of documents that come before key design discipline documentation, e.g., drawings, specifications, and reports.
Chances are, you can’t take a single section or part at face value, as we’ve learned previously from my experience. Clients are savvy, and they’re also risk-averse because they want what they want, when they want it, and it’s up to each tenderer to define how we’re going to give them what they want, and at the right price.
What am I trying to say here? Well, ITTs and RFTs read like contracts, so to arrive at how to best proceed, you have to read and re-read as, chances are there will be a clause/reference/line item pointing the reader to another clause/reference/line item, section, or part. Once you’ve strung your red thread along each dropped pin, next draw up your bid management plan to hit every single component, and even then you might come up with extra ideas and inputs during the tender’s life-cycle.
Dexterity and agility will also give way to innovation and being open to ideas the client never thought of or considered (both new and different). So, be their answer to ‘how do we even build this thing’? Because when clients are assessing tenders end to end or each section in isolation, give them what they want and what you think they want without being too overzealous or self-aggrandising, while also keeping to page-limit restrictions (in some instances). You, as the ideal head contractor, will have worked out the permutations to get yourself from three out of four tenderers to the box seat. This approach isn’t a sure thing, but it will help get you there.
Beyond Pretty Docos and Presos
As an SME in submissions, I know a lot about a lot of things, but not as deeply as the Commercial Manager working with legal on the contract, the Construction Manager who is sequencing the staging and sorting logistics, or the Estimator scoping trade packages alongside subcontractors. But, in our capacity as submissions and bidding experts, we walk the talk as their peers. Gone are the days of making things look ‘pretty,’ submissions professionals add real value as we’re across so much detail and have an innumerable number of touchpoints across an organisation.
Submissions professionals are the linchpin in the deal and never for a second question your role, because you are the corner piece of the winning puzzle - making the connections, sharpening the pitch, and dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. As we all know, details matter, and so do you.
