If you’ve had the experience of working in a highly energised team environment, you’ve most certainly worked on a tender bid. Tender project teams are often from many states and territories and fly-in/fly-out on a regular basis.

In the midst of the action, the tender planning process can become quite exciting and enjoyable, but it can become confusing quite quickly as a lot of planners can become quickly overrun due to the sheer magnitude of many of these projects.

When entering the planning phase for a tender programme, the following steps can be followed to help alleviate the overwhelming feelings that may be experienced during preparation of a tender for a project:

1. Setup the project calendars capturing the RDO’s, Public Holidays, Working and Non-working days. Define the times of work so that planning 
2. Define a High-level WBS structure to capture the Design, Approvals and procurement processes
3. Define an in-depth WBS Structure for the construction & commissioning phase for the programme
4. Define the Activities, logic & sequencing for the construction phase of the project. This will assist in understanding when the team will need to procure and deliver to site. You won’t be able to understand what you need to procure, unless you understand when, where and what you are building.
   More importantly, don’t go into toomuch detail too quickly. Define backup sheets that supplement the durations estimated. Remember it is a tender programme not a construction programme.
5. Define further, the Procurement WBS structure and add the activities required to be delivered for construction.
6. Now that the items required for construction and procurement are defined, you can further define what must be designed and what must be approved. Add these activities into the programme.
7. Review the calendar assignments and then optimise the critical path
8. Allocate resources against activities to understand the requirement for plant, materials and labour (ie, number of cranes per day, number of operators per hour etc)
9. Perform risk analysis on actvities using Monte Carlo Simulation or PERT analysis.
10. Supply the team with periodic reviews of the programme to maintain constant feedback. Don’t leave it until the last week of reviews to issue a programme to the team

This simple approach can help by acting as a high-level check list and guide the planner(s) through a difficult and time consuming period of time. By working backwards through the programmewe can ensure that all activities are captured for the work that will occur, thus preparing our tender programme properly and mimising the risk of providing  a tender programme with missing pieces of information.