The team members are in place, many of whom will have been pillaged from other projects and you need to set them to work. The first priority when managing a bid is to have the customer's bid documentation reviewed. No one person is an expert on all aspects, which is why you have a team comprising members from all different disciplines and that is how you divide up the paperwork. The technical specification will be reviewed by your technical expert, the contractual terms and conditions by the Commercial Manager and so on.

You will need to set a timescale for this, and all other, activities because invariably, bid periods are far too short for the amount of work that needs to be done. A few days should be sufficient for your team of experts to come up with an answer to those burning questions "Do we want this job?" and "Are we capable of doing this job?"

Yes, believe it or not, just because your favourite customer has invited you to tender for a project, you don't actually have to accept his invitation so the very first team decision is the Bid/No Bid. You should, as a company, have a procedure in place which lays out guidelines for making this decision and some of the questions you will have to answer will be as follows:

- Is this the company's core business?
- If it's not core business, do we want to get into this area?
- Can we respond to the Invitation to Tender (ITT) in the required timescale with a feasible bid?
- Do we have the resources to bid and carry out the project, if won

There will be more questions that this but these are the major ones that senior management will need to be answered in order for your bid/no bid decision to be approved.

The first two questions will require the input particularly of your Marketing Manager. This person will, if he's done his job properly, have found out from your customer where a favourable response to this bid could lead. Bidding for a low value pilot project may not seem much in itself but if a successful bid leads to a full development contract, followed by several phases of production or implementation, then that is a different matter. Your Marketing Manager will know how this project relates to others coming along, he will know about the politics surrounding this bid, your customer's expectations, the general feel in the marketplace and the probable competition. He will be able to work out, to a degree, the likelihood of your winning this bid, taking into account the opposition and all sorts of other factors. In general, it will be the Marketing Manager who leads the presentation of the bid/no bid decision to your board of directors, showing anything that may have an affect on the outcome of the bid.

In the next article, we will discuss the management of the bid.