The bid/no bid decision was "bid", so now we have to organise the response to the Invitation to Tender (ITT) from our customer.

Your team already have their copy of the ITT for review and they have had a brief look at it, in order to understand the project sufficiently well to know whether the company is capable of carrying out the work. Now the Project Manager, the Technical Lead and the Commercial Manager, as a minimum, must review the paperwork in detail, responding to every single paragraph in one of three ways. These are "compliant" (yes, we can meet this requirement) "non-compliant" (no, we cannot meet this requirement) or "partially compliant" (we can meet part of it and this is what we recommend). Each individual response will form part of the overall Compliancy Matrix which will be laid out as a table, listing each requirement and our responses.

In addition to the Compliancy Matrix, as a minimum, the Customer will require a Project Management Plan, and Technical Response and a Commercial Response.

As well as the detail of how the project is to be managed overall, the Project Management Plan will include a Programme Plan showing dates and milestones, detail of how sub-contractors are to be managed plus Quality and Configuration Management Plans.

The Technical Response will give details of how each technical requirement will be met.

The Commercial Response will contain, as well as a response to the contractual terms and conditions, the price and payment requirements including a stage payment plan, if required.

If there are to be bought-in good and/or services included, the Procurement Manager will need to feed sub-contractor technical responses, costs, timescales, payment and commercial requirements to the appropriate members of the bid team.

The Bid Manager will co-ordinate all this activity. He will create a plan of exactly when inputs to documents will be required, to allow time for them to be word-processed, proof read, reviewed and approved, corrected, bound and published. This will cover all compliancy responses, narrative, costings and plans.

The Bid Manager will call regular meetings to review progress. In the case of a bid with a short timescale, these will be daily. If time and resources permit, the members of the bid team will be co-located for the duration of the bid, allowing for constant consultation and exchange of ideas.

Finally, the delivery of the bid must be arranged at or just before the exact time designated in the ITT.

When the bid is delivered, the team breathe a huge sigh of relief and wait for the customer to start asking questions.