The Bid Lead and the Bid Manager

1 comments
A decent sized bid needs both of these roles. The Lead does the thinking and the Manager does the organizing and doing. If you merge the roles, you get too few ideas too poorly managed and the bid flounders with lack of direction and lack of effectiveness. When they are staffed by the right people, then it can seem symphonic and the bid will be successful. On a long large bid, these roles will take upper and lower hands at different stages. The bid lead must still be the boss over the bid manager since direction is more critical than managing.

Another interesting terminology I came across recently is to call the Bid Lead the Foreign Minister and to call the Bid Manager as the Interior Minister. Here we are talking about interior and exterior to the bid team, of course. So, the bid manager takes care of things within the bid team and the bid lead takes care of things outside the bid team. These external affairs handled by the Foreign Minister would be things like getting internal approvals, getting budgets, getting resources, communicating with the customer and so on. The bid manager's responsibilities on the other hand are to manage the bid team and produce the deliverables.