The Emotional Journey of Being Awarded a Project
The Emotional Journey of Being Awarded a Project
Every project team is initially happy when they are awarded a project, but sometimes that initial celebration only lasts for hours, sometimes only minutes. Soon, the team begins wondering why they were awarded the job? What did they leave out? Did the bid include enough contingency to cover those aspects of the job where the scope was not fully accounted for? Is their profit going to be slowly consumed by any holes in the estimate?
Perhaps you feel some fear or trepidation that you did not have time to analyze each subcontractor bid fully. Perhaps your process for leveling bids and managing each bid submission for inclusions and exclusions involves jumping back and forth between too many spreadsheets. Then you keep your fingers crossed that the last-minute merging of individual spreadsheets hasn’t introduced math errors into your final number.
“Hope is not a strategy”. Did you submit your bid with a lack of confidence in your number? In the absence of that confidence, you simply “hope” your bid will win, and if it does, you “hope” the slim margin included in your bid is enough to cover any missing scope. After being awarded the job, your team has discovered a hole in your bid, and now you're hoping that the project will have enough change orders to squeeze out a profit.
Now that you have been awarded the job, you have in fact discovered that your bid had some holes in it. Your celebration turns to anger as you try and figure out how this could happen, especially knowing that it has happened too many times in the past.
You're happy and have reason to be, because you used BidMatrix to manage the right mix of subcontractors. You’re confident in your bid because the real-time subcontractor analysis of each bid-package meant that you had more time to review each bid package and play various “what-if” scenarios. BidMatrix allowed your team to effectively work in a virtual bid room / war room environment, regardless of where each of your team members were located. In the end, the efficiencies gained, and the benefit of real-time bid analysis provided by BidMatrix, supported that notion that it’s not only about getting awarded the project, but also about being awarded the project for the right price!