Mind the Gap: Exploring the Main Challenges that Bid Managers Face

Janna Larma's summary of the recent Mind the Gap event attended by Bid Perfect originally appeared on Huddle.com.

The event featured talks from James Matthews, Head of Enterprise Technology at Huddle, Marcus Eden-Ellis, founder of bid consultant Bid Perfect, Kevin Goodman, Head of Business Excellence at Go-Ahead Group PLC, and Steven Dove, Global Programme and Project Head at Williams Lea.

Mind the Gap was centred on the key challenges bid managers face during the bidding process, such as time and knowledge gaps, which could result in an organisation losing a large project. The industry experts shared their thoughts on how teams could bring increased efficiency to the process and ultimately deliver better quality bids

Marcus Eden-Ellis explored what can be done to bridge the gaps to a winning, highlighting the fact that the bid management process is a deadline driven one and lack of communication and collaboration are typical hurdles along the way. He also covered the fact that, during the bid process, it is often not convenient to send a document in a linear way – to one person at a time to be edited. However, sending a document via email to multiple people at once and collating all the resulting feedback often creates confusion for a team leader and may lead to errors.

James Matthews flagged how some of the typical challenges for bid managers – such as lack of accountability and transparency – can be eliminated via Huddle. Using the cloud collaboration service, all information is stored in a secure, central environment and a full audit trail provides full insight into actions around a document, colleagues’ feedback and activity.

Williams Lea, the global business process outsourcing company, and Go-Ahead, one of the UK’s leading public transport providers, both use Huddle to help manage the bid process.

“Bids are global in nature, so there is a real coordination effort,” said Steve Dove when describing the bidding process at Williams Lea. The company uses Huddle to manage disparate teams across the globe and adoption rates have been high. “E-mails are a tough way to work, so there is a real benefit to having all the documentation in one place,” he concluded.

Kevin Goodman from Go-Ahead agreed that Huddle has helped streamline the company’s bidding process which involves diverse, dynamic groups who join the process at different stages. Go-Ahead not only collaborates on data via Huddle, with teams commenting on and sharing files, but have implemented a Huddle workspace as a knowledge bank library. Goodman stated:

“We wanted to make sure that we can retain our corporate knowledge and Huddle gave us a tool to do that”. Goodman also mentioned how he was meticulous with implementing Huddle from the offset but due to the intuitive nature of the software it has been quickly adopted. “The flexibility to control teams and permissions is the best part,” he said

We hope that Mind the Gap provided our attendees with some useful tips for overcoming some of the challenges faced when managing bids and we’re delighted that Williams Lea and Go-Ahead have successfully adopted Huddle to streamline their own processes and ensure teams are more productive.