Bids, Tenders and Proposals: Winning Business through Best Practice (Bids, Tenders & Proposals: Winning Business Through Best)

'Project summaries' or 'contract histories' are a means of validating the claims made by bidders about the experience they can bring to an assignment. This information is normally the subject of a separate section of the bid; clients may require it to be set out on a standard form or template.

To pull their weight in a bid, projects have to be:

• relevant - to the skills required to undertake the proposed services;

• recent - preferably undertaken within the past five years;

• related to the individuals or teams named in the bid.

The last point is especially important. The experience of a firm resides principally in the people who performed the work. The experts who made a success of a comparable job four or five years ago may have moved on to other employment. But if they still work for you and are available to undertake the proposed contract, use the fact to your advantage by emphasizing it in this part of the bid.

If the bid is being submitted by a group or consortium and their record includes contracts on which they have worked together successfully, make a point of describing the results and present this experience as evidence of the benefits that the group can achieve for its clients.

People who have recently started in business may not yet have built up an independent record of experience. But their career backgrounds will probably include achievements and responsibilities that can be used to portray their professional strengths, as noted in the guidance on pre-qualification (Chapter 5).

The process of developing project summary material is similar to that outlined for CVs. Information about the work is held in a database and adapted for particular applications. To provide comprehensive data for use in pre-qualification material and bids, the material should include the following information:

• title of the contract, with a reference number for internal office use;

• name of the client and identity of client manager(s) responsible for the work;

• contract value;

• outline of scope of the contract;

• comments on its perceived degree of success in meeting the client's objectives;

• an itemized account of the services provided;

• start and completion dates;

• outputs and key deliverables, including reports;

• names of project director/team leader and other key team members;

• names of other firms or external consultants associated in the contract;

• any exceptional features of the work.

If a contract has involved more than one field of expertise or focus of interest, it is useful to have more than one summary available. The factual basis remains the same, but different aspects of the work can be brought into prominence in each version to suit the emphasis of the bid. For instance, a project to create a hotel and resort complex may be summarized from a planning and architectural standpoint, or in terms of tourism development, financial and investment analysis, hotel sector training and employment, engineering services, construction scheduling or project management, depending on the context.

Do not focus solely on the technical content of project experience. The management side of your contract record may be of equal importance to the client - particularly your ability to deliver results to specification, on time and within budget.

There are sectors of business and government in which past and existing clients may not wish to have their identity made public or their need for specialist advice revealed. Respect their position and safeguard your relationship with them; but you do not have to leave the assignments out of your statement of experience. It should be possible to describe the work and the features that make it relevant to the bid without disclosing the client's identity. For example, you can refer to a project for 'a multinational corporation', 'a leading European telecommunications company', 'a government department', 'London-based timber importers', 'a UK defence contractor' and so forth.

Project summaries need to be maintained and kept up to date on a systematic basis in the same way as CVs. Contracts that have been completed should not be represented in a bid by summaries written while the work was still in progress. When a contract starts, it should immediately be entered into the database. When the work is completed, summaries should be updated with the aid of the final report and other project documents.

• Structure the summaries into categories of experience.

• Provide an index to this part of the bid, so that the client can easily access an individual summary. You can add impact to the index by presenting it graphically as a table or matrix.

• It is unreasonable to expect a client to trudge through 30 pages of lengthy project descriptions, however big and important the contracts. Do not overwhelm the client with verbiage - a clear signal of lack of self-confidence - or make reading your bid a tedious chore. It is far better to include a careful selection of experience, directly relevant to the subject of the bid, than to pile on masses of peripheral material.

• A limit of 20 lines for each summary should give you enough space to communicate the essential features of an assignment without straying into excessive detail. Never let the text of the summary extend for more than a page - and a page-long project summary should be a rare exception.

• Use titles that are informative about the scope of the work. 'Bridgewater Rehabilitation Phase II' may mean something to you and the client that commissioned the work, but a different client will need a more explanatory title.