‘But it’s 118 pages long!’ exclaimed the project manager. ‘We can’t expect a service provider to read this when they turn up to do work for us.’

Picture this: I’m at a meeting with a client (a big Aussie company), presenting the draft of a document I’ve just completed for them. We (that’s me and the team I wrote the document for) are now socialising the document within the organisation. Considering what was presented, I was somewhat taken aback (to put it mildly) that the comment about the document’s length was the first piece of feedback we received.

In this last part of my Love me, tender series,  I attack … I mean, I cast a critical eye over the response requirements for procurement documents. By ‘response requirements’ I mean the content you expect from a service provider to demonstrate they’re right for the job, and how you want that content to be presented.

Read my three final tips for procument document writers.

Do you get lots of requests for clarification to your RFPs and other procurement documents? Do you receive responses with varying content and levels of detail that make comparison difficult? These are measures of how clear your procurement documents are.

The question is: how can you make them clearer?

It’s essential that you consider how service providers will interpret and use your procurement documents. With timeframes to meet and the effort required to get tenders out the door, the less confusion for service providers, the better. After all, service providers are the primary audience of your document.

Given the cost of developing procurement documents, organisations need to take care to achieve the best possible outcome. Just look at what’s at stake: the commitment to a solution or service, with its associated—and potentially large—financial transaction, contract period and changes to business operations.

I hate flowcharts!  Harsh, yes, so allow me to explain …

As a means of mapping or modelling a process, socialising and refining it, and as a visual representation of it, flowcharts are hard to beat.  They make processes easier to define, understand and follow.  But as the final documented form of processes, flowcharts aren’t always effective.

It's not flowcharts per se that are the problem—it's that, often, they’re poorly drawn.  And that's why I hate flowcharts.

MS Word templates … do you use them?

When I say ‘template’, I don’t mean a single-paged document with a few headings that you have to try and craft a report from.  I mean a multi-paged fully-branded document based on a company-wide style sheet.  And I mean a structured document with standard headers, footers, sections, headings, and lots of instructions to explain what’s expected of the author.

So, why bother with templates like that?