I agree with everyone who also thinks that the process of tendering is guaranteed to deliver poor value for money.

The problems begin with writing the ‘Invitation to Tender’. 

This can take ages, with many stakeholders adding their wish lists until it becomes a behemoth of a document, riddled with contradictions, impossibilities and soon-to-be-outdated concepts. 

After months of opinion-gathering,writing and revisions, the Invitation to Tender might finally be sent to firms to respond to.

The second problem is the cost of responding. 

If the Invitation to Tender is sent to six similar firms, then each firm has a one-in-six chance of winning or, put another way, it will take six responses to win one contract. Hence, to break even over time, firms will need to inflate their quote to include the project delivery plus six times the cost of responding.

The third problem is the amount of time it all takes.

After the time spent writing the invitation, scheduling the pitches, the subsequent deliberations and the drafting of contracts, a firm will finally begin building the product, quite possibly a year or two after it was first conceived. 

That it will be out-of-date when is delivered is pretty much unavoidable. Worse still, even if this becomes apparent, the deliverables are tied into a legally-binding contract to make the product as specified, whether or not it will have any useful purpose or relevance when delivered.

And that is why tendering takes too long, costs too much and lacks the flexibly to respond to our rapidly changing technical landscape.

PS. The longest Invitation to Tender I recall receiving was 68 pages - does anyone want to raise me?

Cheers, 

Phil Blume

On 11 Dec 2019, at 12:59, Andy Baker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

 

I agree completely with Tony.

 

The cost for an organisation putting something out to tender can be both large and non-obvious

 

The obvious bits are the extra time and overhead on your side but in addition:

 

1. Any supplier with low margins - quite often the small, nimble ones one could provide the best value - simply can't afford to do tenders. Some of those potential suppliers might have a unique take on your project. 

2. Those that do bid will have the internal processes to handle this and internal costings to recoup all those failed bids. These costs will be factored in to every bid. You'll pay a "tender" tax simply for going with a supplier that can afford to bid on tenders

3. Tenders tend to push suppliers towards upfront quotes and away from agile approaches. An agile approach might be exactly what you need.

 

I could go on. I've been rehearsing this speech for years! But this is a bit of a tangent from the central topic.

 

As for alternatives - a paid discovery phase where the deliverable is the analysis and a suggested approach. This document should have value in itself (and thus be worth paying for) and can potentially be used by other suppliers if you decide to move forward with a different partner.

 

There's no lock-in. You could potentially get several suppliers to do this as they would all come at the problem from slightly different angles.

 

On Tue, Dec 10, 2019 at 5:01 PM Tony Crockford <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Mark Macleod wrote on 10/12/2019 16:29:

Hey Mike. As an arms length organisation from   a local authority the tender floor (raised last January) is £5k for getting three quotes rather than full tender. That kicks in over 10k.

 

Mark

As a provider of creative services I find the tendering process a bit troublesome.

To work out what a web based project is 'worth' usually requires a great deal of thinking about what's required.

To work out the 'best value' requires a discovery process where we'd normally meet or talk to the client, run through the wish list, work out *with* the client what the actual brief is and then discuss options for tweaking the brief to suit the budget.

To do all this in a (secretive) response to tender, or even a 'one of three quotes' can be off-putting, we've pretty much designed, planned and in a lot of cases feasibility tested the project by the time we put a price on it. 

and then we have to be 'best price'.

(It's not like I can nip down to the warehouse and get a website off the shelf and install it - I get the need for tendering in hardware supply or standard services, or tangible products, but a website?)

Am I missing the point?

Curious to know what the group thinks.
 
(I'm convinced that the bits of work that we get to do for the larger agencies we work with have been 'sold' to the client for far more than we sub contract the work for. )

Does anyone pay for creative discovery projects? 

Or is that something you all do in house?

Do you feel that the tendering process works in your favour?

I guess we're stuck with it, but I can't help but wonder Is there a better way?

 

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