Consider the octopus (and tender management plans)
By Jack Raffin, Tender Specialist (Sydney)
In some form or another, a tender specialist deals in communications. Writing content, giving presentations, leading workshops, drafting mass emails—these different expressions of communication are essential to survive and thrive in the world of tenders.
Step outside these office walls, and you’ll see communication skills are needed everywhere to survive and thrive. Asking for directions, reading traffic lights, ordering a coffee, writing a text message—we’re sending and receiving communications all the time. And that’s all good for the concrete jungle, but how does it go in other habitats?
Take a look underwater and consider the octopus. They can’t make little mouth noises to communicate, but they do have the ability to change their outward appearance, thanks to special cells in their skin called chromatophores. These pigment-filled cells allow octopi to communicate through visuals alone. They can change colour, from red to yellow to green, to bronze, silver, and gold. Really. And they can even change their skin texture, from smooth or spiky, to bumpy and ragged.
It was originally thought that octopi did this as camouflage, but it’s actually a language. Each colour and texture forms part of a large underwater vocabulary. They can express everything from aggression to courtship, from urgency to calm. Through these physical manifestations of internal states, one octopus can cross another octopus and, at a glance, understand what’s going on.
Back to the habitat of tender writing, now consider the tender specialists. They also use a visual language to communicate to each other. It’s called a tender management plan.
The importance of a tender management plan
If you’ve browsed through our Tender Insights, you would’ve come across our tips for how to write a winning bid, or how to juggle multiple tender schedules, but most notably for today is the importance of a tender management plan (or TMP).
A TMP achieves many things, such as:
Allocating roles and resources, like writers and reviewers
Setting up all upcoming milestones, review dates, deadlines
Keeping track of every element of the bid, such as returnable schedules, appendices, and where they’re located and reference each other.
This is all important for a few reasons. A well-drafted TMP provides a snapshot of all criteria and can be rich with insights. It provides assurance that you’re sufficiently organised to coordinate and lead the tender, having considered the framework of the tender documents.
A TMP can also tell you:
Where you need to assign more people on a task—or where someone is maybe overstretched in handling too many tasks
Where some documents may be considered for an earlier review—or where it looks like there’s a struggle to make the next milestone
Where there’s a crossover of content and returnable schedules, where they can better align and speak to each other—making for a stronger, more cohesive bid response.
Customising your tender management plan
Another good thing about a TMP is that it can become a very personalised, custom-made strategic tool where, at a glance, you can understand how the tender response is moving forward.
As long as you’re communicating clearly, and do a good a run-through of your TMP during your kick-off meeting, get creative (and practical) like the octopus. Some colour-coding strategies could be useful for:
Project management
RAG status: Using red, amber, and green to show past, approaching, and future deadlines
Milestones: Using bronze, silver, gold to indicate milestone dates. You could also label specific tasks that have been allocated for earlier/later milestones
Task status
Green: Completed
Yellow/Amber: In progress
Grey/Blue: Not started/not assigned
Red: Overdue/delayed
If you’ve set-up your TMP in Excel, you could use conditional formatting to further customise your plan, including:
Colour gradients
Data bars
Icon sets (maybe arrows and emoji faces could be your thing)
The benefits of a good tender management plan
It’s been said before: language is a mirror of the mind. So too, is the TMP. It’s a mirror of how the tender response is going, how it’s feeling, what it’s thinking, where it’s going. It’s a visual language, the bid response expressing itself.
Aside from being highly customisable, being fluid and adaptive to your needs, a good TMP allows you to:
Prioritise tasks visually, where urgent or high-priority tasks stand out instantly
Improve team efficiency, distributing resources where it’s needed most
Reduce miscommunication, where everyone can understand priorities without over-explaining things, referring to once source of truth.
As you move closer to the final submission, look at your TMP. It’s gone through many changes, many emotional highs and lows, many colours and textures—from aggressive reds and purples, to teething out of ambers and oranges, to mellow fields of pastel green or vistas of cerulean blues. And in between the meetings you’ve missed, or had to re-schedule, or have one on in a few minutes, there, at a glance, your TMP says how everything is going, how everything feels.
And this is another key element of the TMP, philosophically speaking. For the different teams working on a tender, it’s a shared set of chromatophores (but not skin cells, rather spreadsheet cells). And within the potential organised chaos, you might feel lost at sea. But look closer, there’s your TMP, the miraculous colourful dancing octopus, showing you the way home.
Now, if you need further inspiration on how to plan, organise, and communicate the status of your next project, consider the octopus and a solid TMP. Of course, if you need further assistance in putting together a winning bid plan, strategy, and response, consider a team of professional tender specialists, such as getting in touch with Tender Plus.
For further insights and discussions, check out what makes for a good bid response and how to better prepare for your next tender.