Our main goal at PL Projects is to provide quality tailored support to our clients’ projects, programmes and portfolios through our qualified, caring and committed consultants, trainers and support staff. We obtain different business opportunities through portals, frameworks, dynamic purchasing systems (DPS), bid applications and direct marketing. If you are a service organisation, you may be able to relate to some of these business strategies above.

Our business has experienced significant growth over the last 7 years, we have developed from a team of 3 directors, to a team of 23 staff, still with many development plans for the future! To take us to the ‘next level’ (you could say), we have had to invest more of our own resources in applying to different frameworks, DPS’s and bid applications over the last 9 months. Unfortunately, as a result of COVID, a number of our clients had to place particular projects on hold due to lack of funding and allocating resources elsewhere throughout the business. This was obviously very disappointing, however in true PL Projects’ spirit, we tried to use this new found ‘free time’ more wisely and invest in creating a bid management structure in our small business.

We wanted to share some tips and tricks that we have learnt since creating this structure to help other SMEs do the same.

• Outline the objectives for the bid management structure (BMS).
  • Why are you creating this structure?

• Devise benefits that you would like to achieve from the BMS.
  • What value do you want to obtain? Is it monetary, business opportunities or efficiency…?

• Assign business stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities.
  • This tells people within your business what they are expected to do in the process to ensure there is no confusion.

• Create a process flowchart for all in the business to be able to access.
  • This visual representation helps everyone to understand the process, especially if you bring more stakeholders from outside the bid management team to assist in the bid application process.

• Create a dedicated folder on your business’ web-based platforms systems.
  • This ensures that all documents will be saved in an organised manner and accessible at all times.

• Achieve buy-in from the rest of your organisation to ensure a smooth implementation process.
  • When creating a new process in a business, buy-in from stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. We suggest conducting different internal marketing campaigns to promote the new process and obtain senior stakeholders’ buy-in firstly so it trickles down to the rest of the business.