By Peter Coyle, CEO, BiD Masters

If you’ve ever been involved with a bid, you’ll appreciate the relief of finally submitting it. After many weeks, sometimes months, of hard work, last-minute changes, and weekend slogs, your team has got it over the line.

From my experience, bids often follow the same pattern: a steady start, a messy middle, and a frantic finish. It’s clear that one problem stubbornly persists across organisations and sectors: schedule adherence.

So, what makes a bid schedule slip and how can you prevent it?

Your schedule is rarely the problem

At the start of a pursuit, bid managers typically build a clear schedule designed to hit the submission deadline. What counts as “the start” of a bid is a debate in itself (one for another article, perhaps?) as capture activity begins long before the formal bid kick off.

A good schedule works backwards from the deadline, making sure there’s enough time for each stage of the process to create the bid proposal and accompanying documents properly.

Bid schedules are, by their nature, tight and there’s little room for contingency. So poor schedule adherence can lead to many bids running out of time. This results in one of three options:

1. Request an extension
2. Decide on a no-bid
3. Squeeze the schedule to fit

The third option is most common, but it comes with compromises. Will you squeeze completeness or quality? Compromising either will damage your score, and both will affect your team’s morale.

Is poor schedule adherence, therefore, a planning failure? Not necessarily, because most organisations build a bid schedule that should work in theory. However, it depends on the granularity of the schedule: have you assigned the tasks based on each individual’s availability? Also, when an adherence failure happens it can have knock-on effects creating a chain reaction throughout the schedule.

Suffering the chain reaction

Everyone involved in the bid has a role to play, and their ability to meet the deadlines set is critical. When one person misses a target date, any carefully built plan can start to unravel.

A delay must be absorbed by someone else down the line, which can compromise their ability to deliver their role properly. So, they compromise on completeness or quality, passing on something that leaves the next person unable to deliver at their best. And so, the chain reaction continues until a below par bid proposal evolves.

In practical terms, a delay in receiving technical content can lead to a tighter writing window, and an even tighter review timeframe. The submission date isn’t budging.

Why schedule deadlines slip

Teams can miss schedule deadlines for many reasons. Here are some common ones we see time and again.

1. Unrealistic schedules set without proper input from contributors
2. Conflicting priorities for people within the bid
3. Senior leaders reviewing the solution too late in the schedule
4. Conflicting priorities that pull people onto other live projects or work
5. Lack of genuine commitment to the bid timeline
6. Gaps in capability or capacity within the team

Bid managers can control some of these causes for slippage. By communicating with all concerned, they can ensure a realistic schedule. And by mapping available capabilities to roles, they can ensure everyone in the team is able to do their best.

But bid managers cannot control a subject matter expert who misses a deadline because they’re pulled onto another piece of work, or a reviewer who deprioritises the bid because no one highlighted the urgency. These problems are not poor bid management, they’re organisational failings in prioritising schedule adherence.

A bid manager can build the best schedule in the world and still fail to create a high-quality bid if the people contributing to it are not genuinely accountable.

A governance lens worth using

One way to think about this is through a simple RACI lens.

• Who is Responsible for each milestone?
• Who is Accountable for the bid overall?
• Who needs to be Consulted?
• Who simply needs to be Informed?

Many bid schedules name responsible owners for each task but stop short of establishing who is accountable when those owners slip, and what happens next.

That gap, between naming a deadline and enforcing it, is often where adherence breaks down. It raises a genuine question for leadership teams: should there be consequences when someone misses their target, and if so, what should they look like?

But a heavy-handed approach isn’t the answer. It risks damaging morale and discouraging honest, early flags when a deadline is at risk. Conversely, having no consequence to a slipped deadline risks signalling that the schedule is optional.

The cost of getting schedule adherence wrong

The cost of poor schedule adherence can be seen in many ways across an organisation. It’s the incomplete and rushed bid documents that don’t quite deliver what you originally intended. It’s the exhausted and demoralised bid teams reluctant to take on the next opportunity. And it’s the contracts you didn’t win because everything failed to come together as planned.

Here’s a thought to ponder. The bid that wins is rarely the one created by the most talented writers. Instead, it’s often the one where the schedule held together, the team had time to think, and the final check happened with hours to spare rather than minutes.

Steps to improve schedule adherence

While adhering to a bid schedule can be complex, there are several practical ways you can try and keep on track.

• Get clear on your bid strategy from day one. Communicate it clearly to everyone involved.
• Ensure your schedule is realistic. Provide your team with everything they need to achieve it and check they understand their deadlines.
• Create an open-door culture. Encourage people to speak up promptly when they’re struggling and provide help without judgement.

What’s next?

Schedule adherence generally requires a collective approach that often starts with senior leaders. So, I leave you with three questions that may help to move your approach forward:

1. How do you build genuine commitment to a bid schedule among people who are not full-time bid professionals?
2. Should missed deadlines carry consequences, and who should own that decision?
3. What would it take for schedule adherence to become the rule rather than the exception in your organisation?

If you’d like to discuss your approach to schedule adherence with me I’d be happy to hear from you. Perhaps I can help.