Good bids and proposals on their own may not win you business. Bad ones, however, will lose it! - D Nickson
Complex bid management and good business winning is one of the most challenging aspects within business. Easy to get wrong, yet rewarding when done well, it brings together many types of people, processes and viewpoints. This merging of skills and views can be extremely challenging, with lack of understanding and inter-functional tensions often present. If you wish to bid professionally and win, please get in touch.
Rich Hartley has over 20 years of bid and solution creation experience throughout the entire lifecycle. From design & development, production, through to in-service support bids, totalling over £750m in direct pragramme wins, with support to other wins taking that number over £1bn. In that time, he has worked within different company bid frameworks such as Cobham, Boeing and BAE Systems each with its own take on colour and other gated reviews. For a period, Rich also taught bid & solution management within Boeing Defence UK, from both a high level solution view down to the specific SME input level. Bringing life and examples to what he describes as the three lenses - Customer Lens, Leadership Team Lens, Bid Team Lens - giving the perspective and desired outcomes of each.
Some years ago the following diagram was developed by Technospirit Consulting, to help guide others through the complexities of bid and solution creation. It draws together systems engineering thinking and a number of business aquisition processes, from customer requirements right down to sub-tier statements of work and internal basis of estimates. Designed with language people can relate to, it helps to guide mixed teams of engineering, PM, finance and commercial, to understand how a customer need is broken down and ultimately built back up into a solution and bid. A process similar to this was used for bids in excess of £600m, where Rich held the position of Solution Lead, and it has been tailored to smaller bids too.
Across the years Rich has worked in every space above, across the full solution and bid space. From system requirements capture and flowdown, to SME, Technical SOW Owner, SSOW Writer, Bid Writer, Book Captain, Leadership Team Reviewer and Full Solution Lead. Including developing pricing solutions, and authoring commercial aspects and KPIs in some cases. The result is the ability to interface with every party in a bid team, understand viewpoints and needs, support and coach more inexperienced members and provide others with someone to lean on in periods of high work rate.
In 2012, Boeing Defence UK sought to grow their portfolio through adjacencies to the Chinook programme. Approached by the UK Customer to enter a competitive PBL bid for engine repair. BDUK initially assessed the bid as a low PWin of ~25%. 
As solution lead, Rich provided key contributions to BDUK's Chinook Engine Support Arrangement (CESA) ~£130m winning submission, including mapping the full supply chain whilst creating a digital end-to-end model, building up the bid elements, developing the cost model construct and authoring a number of commercial clauses. Shaping the service and how the value proposition worked at varying levels of flying hours. The initial CESA solution construct endured and was successfully re-contracted years later. Rich went on to be solution lead for the Chinook TLCS-2 contract.
RECOGNITION - The CESA bid team were awarded the 2013 BDUK Managing Directors Award for their success.
Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing — Warren Buffett
With ongoing concern around future military funding and the existing fiscal pressures upon current programmes, the ability to “win bad business” becomes a very real risk for any potential contractor. Risk and Opportunity management can make or break a successful bid. Management of aggregated risks, from internal 3 point estimates, supplier quotations and discrete risks set against specific concerns, combines to create a complex picture for both the bid team and leadership. Furthermore, time pressures often placed by customers upon bidding windows and post submission contract negotiation windows can create a hazardous situation for the contractor if not managed well. This is where experience and methodology supports "winning good business" and equally it helps decision makers to understand the point at which one should not agree to bad business.
With MBA and APMP training in both risk and project management, Rich also has significant hands-on experience in risk and opportunity management particularly in large scale bids and solutions. Resulting in techniques that understand and aggregate different types of risk. Allowing bid teams to fully articulate to decision makers what a minimum viable outcome should be for negotiation purposes.
As solution lead for a multi-million pound proposal, Rich was heading up the total engineering submission across all departments. Each had built their own 3-point Basis of Estimate from many lines of ESOW and their own tailored risk position. During post-submission negotiation, the Customer asked for a significant overall price reduction and the business being in a must win mindset considered a blanket cut to programme pricing. However, Rich's analysis of the estimating and discrete risk positions demonstrated that the desired number would likely create an undeliverable position, and no reserves. Indeed for many teams who bid into the proposal, this was below even 'best case' on their 3-point estimates and would remove key risk pots. Instead a series of negotiated requirement cuts was achieved, to balance executability over simple customer desire. Importantly, from a negotiation perspective, the company was able to link the pricing and risk to specific elements of the solution - crucial in MoD audit environments. Therefore convincing the customer that it was not simple brinksmanship but in fact a calculated and viable win-win for both parties.
