As part of our robust bid management process, Impart undertakes a Red Team Review (RTR) at the end of the bid writing-review cycle, prior to submission.
Under normal circumstances, it’s best practice to attend a RTR in person as getting everyone in a room together encourages discussion and participation from the whole team, and eliminates email distractions and multitasking. Plus, at this point in the process we’re really close to the bid and the customer, and it’s enjoyable to come together to add the finishing touches to it. As we go through the response, sharing our screen via a projector, we invite feedback, discussion and debate from the Red Team reviewers, strengthening the bid as much as possible and ensuring it is compelling, aligned to the win themes, compliant with the specification and evaluation criteria, reads clearly and is concise.
Whilst lockdown hasn’t impacted the way we do business it has restricted our ability to attend RTRs in person with our clients. Therefore, over the last four months we’ve been running RTRs via video calls, sharing the responses on the screen, and running through the bids in their entirety in a very similar way as we would have if we were all in a room together.
Despite the unusual circumstances everyone is always in high spirits and the value of the process has been evident from the reviewers’ enthusiastic contributions to improving the documents. The depth of discussion and involvement of all the participants on the calls has brought an element of normality back to the current situation, and at times it’s been easy to forget that we’re not all in the same room. This has consistently had a positive impact on reviewers’ focus throughout the RTRs and at the end of the sessions everyone agrees that the bids are at an even higher standard than they were at the start.
The videoconferencing software (our customers use a mix of Teams, Webex and Zoom) has been incredibly useful in supporting our collaborative reviews of the responses and sharing everyone’s thoughts and amendments. For example, Red Team reviewers have been able to send revised wording via the message function, allowing us to make amendments live, reducing the actions required after the reviews. Whilst we still recommend face-to-face RTRs, we’re delighted that such an important and collaborative part of our bidding process has worked so well during lockdown.
If you’d like to know how Impart could support you, please email Dave at dave.austin@impart.co.uk or call for a no-obligation chat on 03333 448789.
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