Working on a tender in a joint venture
Gemma Jones, Principal Tender Specialist (Brisbane)
Working as part of a joint venture or consortium can be challenging and extremely rewarding, with many valuable lessons to learn along the way. When two or more parties join ranks on a bid, it’s important to clearly define the values and experiences that each brings to the table including both advantages and disadvantages for the tender.
Sharing values and goals
Identifying the strategy behind the partnership from the outset is crucial to ensuring a cohesive approach to the tender writing. Aligning each party's brand values or objectives from the start will establish how you best respond to the client’s project objectives and help fully understand the shared goals, project vision and outcome each business strives to achieve.
This can be done through initial brand alignment workshops, project strategy sessions when tender documents are released or the creation of a project charter. A project charter will often define the project vision, scope, agreed responsibilities and behaviours for each party, and can help to guide the decision-making process.
Agreeing on the decision-making process and who holds specific responsibilities is crucial to identifying how you navigate differences and handle the review and approval process for the tender.
Striving for best-for-project solutions and outcomes will still require final agreeance and approval. Establishing who will make those calls for each of the review stages, or if a stalemate occurs is key to ensuring the smooth progression of the joint tender offer.
Ensuring clear boundaries
Even the most well-developed Tender Management Plans with the best intentions of agreeing on the input and output of both businesses can often fall flat if there are blurred lines of accountability. Not only should your Tender Management Plan assign responsibilities for sections or documents in the tender, but it can also highlight who is accountable for the final production of specific areas with one or two people as an extra layer to fall back on if the responsible parties are not completing their agreed functions.
Effective communication is a keystone to the dynamic of working with joint venture teams, for more tips on mastering communication, read How To Communicate on Winning Tenders.
Ensuring both parties agree on the percentage split of input into the tender writing and tender management, whether it be 50/50 or a consortium of far more members with unequal shares is important for the tender team to convey the strategy and positioning of the business partnership and what that brings to the advantage of the project.
Navigating conflict
At least one or more instances of disagreement are bound to happen in a joint venture or consortium bid with multiple parties and layers of stakeholders, with the real key to conflict resolution being mitigation and management of possible conflict. Part of the risk management process is ensuring the tender is set up for success with agreements and responsibilities for each party approved and documented for clarity throughout the tender process.
Early identification of issues or challenges that may cause conflict will enable collaborative problem-solving and swift resolution to continue a forward trajectory to the tender deadline. Proactive and respectful conflict management should mitigate roadblocks and delays in decision-making, and ensure all parties are in agreeance on how the project solution continues to be developed.
Successful collaboration
Genuine and impactful collaboration is key to all tenders, none more so than those with multiple parties and stakeholders. Ensuring open lines of communication and clear responsibilities and accountabilities from tender team members, subject matter experts, consultants or collaborators is paramount to streamlined decision-making and overall tender progress.
Established guidelines and processes for review milestones with agreed input from authors and reviewers can be critical to avoid time-consuming rework or delays in closing out content. Early identification of any roadblocks or delays caused by team dynamics, capacity or capability should be raised and resolved as soon as possible. Resilience, flexibility and adaptability are crucial to the challenges and pressure-cooker environment that working on tenders amplifies. For more on the importance of team resilience and strategies to build an adaptable team, read Manifesting resilience on tenders.
Collaboration has long been a buzzword simply defined as working together, no matter how well or ineffectively teams collaborate. To me, true collaboration is a synergy between a team that results in the smooth development of a project, efficient decision-making, and results in a cohesive outcome.
Key insights for smooth collaboration between multi-party ventures include:
Identify and define your individual and shared values to align your project vision and positioning.
Make clear definitions and distinctions of the responsibilities and accountabilities of each team member and organisation and who will review each section of the response (often the fewer reviewers, the more streamlined the process, so consider who is critical to review content and what the close-out and approval process is).
Streamline your workflow and set up shared systems from the project start, or agree on using one organisation’s IT system for document templates, file storage, content libraries and tender management etc.
Be respectful when navigating through areas of conflict in the most efficient and effective means possible.
Maintain the shared vision and goal of the joint venture or consortium throughout the content writing process. Clearly articulate the benefits of the organisations joining forces and how this influences or ensures positive project outcomes. This should be woven throughout all parts of the tender response to adequately reinforce why the solution they offer is the best for the client.
Working as part of a joint venture with multiple organisations and teams can be an extremely rewarding experience in the connections made along the way and the value of learning alongside others. The joint venture or consortium team dynamic should ideally work no differently from any other high-performing team with the tender and project team performing as one cohesive unit.
If you’re daunted at the thought of your next joint-venture or consortium bid and could use some of the above guidance or practical strategies on your next project, get in touch with the Tender Plus team today for tender writing, tender management, tender coordination, tender services, tender training, tender strategy and more.