Field Manual
The Bid Manager's Field Manual
Practical guides for the people who find, qualify and win public-sector work: the routines, the judgement calls, and the parts of the job nobody writes down.
The job
Getting into the role, and getting good at it. What public-sector business development actually involves.
How to become a bid manager and what the job is really like
What bid managers actually do week to week, the five routes into the role, what certification is worth, and how to get hired without the title.
Your first 90 days running tenders
A sequenced ninety day plan for anyone who has just taken over tenders, from the first inventory to the first properly chosen bid.
The routines
The recurring work: monitoring, alert hygiene, qualification, handover. Procedures you can run and hand to someone else.
The coverage audit: checking what your alerts are missing
A quarterly routine that measures how much relevant work your team never saw, and traces every miss to a cause you can fix.
How to check tender portals in twenty minutes each morning
A fixed twenty minute daily pass and a one hour weekly pass for checking tender sources, with timeboxes and a printable checklist.
Tuning tender alerts so your team actually reads them
A quarterly procedure for cutting alert noise. Measure precision, rebuild on classification codes, add disqualifiers, and test before you trust the change.
A bid/no-bid checklist you can run in ten minutes
Hard stops first, then a six-dimension score. A qualification routine that ends in a defensible decision and one line in a log.
Choosing which procurement portals to watch
Work out which tender portals your firm actually needs by mapping market segments to publication tiers, then testing each portal on one quarter of its real output.
Assessing a tender in a language you do not read
A twenty minute triage that reaches a yes, no or get-help decision on a foreign-language tender before you pay for a single word of translation.
The edge
Finding the opportunities other bidders miss, and getting to them earlier.
How to find next year's tenders in this year's award notices
Award notices publish the contract start date and its duration. Add them up and you get the re-tender window, a year or more before the notice appears.
Five reasons relevant tenders never reach you
The structural reasons public work never reaches your alerts, and the check to run for each one this week.
How to read award notices for competitor intelligence
Award notices are the free public record of who won and against how many bidders. Use them to profile your rivals and to price the next bid honestly.
How to win public sector work as a subcontractor
Find the firms that just won contracts you could help deliver, and approach them in the weeks before mobilisation. What to send, and which terms to check first.
How to talk to public buyers before the tender is published
What you can legitimately do in the months before a notice appears, where buyers publish their plans, and how to keep a record that protects you.
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