The two faces of Bid Management

Working on many bids over the years, I have realized that in any given deal I am either playing a Thinking role or an Organizing role. In some situations and deals, I have tried to play both the Thinking and Organizing roles and these have been extremely challenging and painful. I have come to the conclusion that on any successful deal, these two roles are different and both must be filled independently with sufficient leadership bandwidth for the bid to succeed.


Organizing Roles are Bid Manager, Proposal Manager and the like. Thinking roles are Transition Expert, Solution Architect, Solution Integrator and such. The thinking role can also be called Solution Lead. The Solution Lead is constantly bothered with making the solution / offer to the client stand out. When I say solution, my definition is broad and covers every aspect of the solution (business requirements coverage, technology, delivery model, positioning, commercial model and so on). So, the design of everything that the client will base his decision on, is the Solution Lead's baby. 

The Organizing role is Project Management to the core. Managing the bid as a project and making sure the plans and deliverables are moving forward is this person's job. The organizing role calls for managing all the deliverables that will eventually go to the client. Put differently, the Organizing role makes sure the proposal and the bid and questions on the RFP and so on are all getting delivered on time.

There appears to be a grey area in between...the solution lead is dependent on the organizing lead for getting his ideas on the deliverables. Similarly, the organizing lead is dependent on the solution lead for the structure / storyline of what needs to go to the client. 

This interdependence is a fact of life and where this is managed well, bids succeed and where it is not, the results are painfully obvious. So, for effective working, the solution lead and organizing lead should be completely aligned and working closely with each other.

Should there be a hierarchical relationship between the two? YES. One of them - Solution Lead or Organizing Lead - should be named the Bid Manager.

Who should that be? On small deals where the Solution Lead is purely in an advisory role, the Bid Manager can be the Organizing Lead. On larger critical bids, the solution lead must be the Bid Manager. Of course, one or the other should have a dotted reporting to the bid manager, in all cases. This ensures that the decision maker is clear and the roles are transparent. This also ensures that while the Solution Lead is mainly thinking about the solution, since the Organizing Lead has a dotted reporting to the Bid Manager (Solution Lead), sufficient oversight responsibility and control is given to the Solution Lead and there exists clear accountability. 

In all cases, the Bid Manager gets to pick his team and everyone reports to him for the duration of the bid.