Before you decide where the hours go
How your tender answers actually get scored
Who gives you the mark? One person, holding your answer against one criterion, on a scale the buyer published before the tender went out. Everything below follows from that, including where your week should go.
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What the pack already tells you
- The criteria. The named things being marked, in the buyer's own words. Quality, social value, delivery, price and mobilisation are common headings, and the names that matter are the ones in your pack.
- The weightings. How the total marks are split between those criteria, usually as percentages that add to a hundred.
- The scale. How each individual answer is scored, and what a mark on that scale is supposed to mean. Many schemes publish a written descriptor for each point.
Find all three before you write anything. If any of them isn't in the documents, that's a clarification question, and asking it early is free. The compliance list carries the deadline that governs it.
How the mark is arrived at
Tender evaluation scoring works by splitting the award decision into named criteria, giving each one a share of the total marks, and marking every answer against its own criterion on a published scale. The buyer sets all three before the tender goes out and prints them in the documents, so the pack you have been sent already tells you what each answer is worth.
Weighting decides where your hours go
The section people find easiest to write is often the one carrying the fewest marks, and effort drifts towards it unless somebody stops it.
Take a scheme, invented here purely to show the arithmetic, that puts 60 of its marks on quality and 40 on price, and splits the quality marks across four questions of 15 each. Two of those questions are about things you do every day. Two are about things you'd have to go and evidence.
The two easy ones are worth 30 marks between them and will take a morning. The two hard ones are worth the same 30 and will take a week. A plan that spends the week on the easy pair loses half the quality marks.
The one-page thing worth building first
Put the criteria in a column, the weighting beside each, and your own honest guess at how you'd score today beside that. The gaps sort themselves into order without you having to decide anything.
What a low mark usually means
On most published scales, the difference between a middle mark and a top mark isn't better prose. It's whether the answer is specific to this contract, whether it is evidenced, and whether it covers everything the criterion asked for.
That's why a generic answer scores in the middle at best. The government's own advice to suppliers is to avoid submitting previously successful or generic tender responses, and to tailor your answers to the organisation. That is most of the craft of writing the method statement.
It also asks for measurable outcomes and buyer-specific benefits. An evaluator who has to take a claim on trust will mark it lower than one they can check, and they'll be right to.
Price is scored too, and usually separately
Price normally carries its own share of the marks and its own formula, printed in the pack. Read the formula before you set a price, because it decides how much a given reduction is actually worth to you.
Check the arithmetic in your pricing schedule against the numbers in your written answers as well. Those two disagreeing is one of the quieter ways a strong bid loses.
Where do you find all this?
In the tender documents themselves, reached through the notice on Find a Tender, which costs nothing to search. What that service is and when it changed are on the page about the Procurement Act 2023.
If a criterion or a weighting is missing from what you've been sent, ask through the clarification process rather than guessing. Your guess and the evaluator's scheme are unlikely to match.
What to do with the scheme once you've got it
- Write the criterion above each answer, in the buyer's words, and leave it there until the day you submit.
- Put the weighting beside it, and plan your hours against the weighting rather than against the word count.
- For every claim, name the evidence you'd point to if an evaluator asked. If there isn't one, that's the work.
- Have somebody who didn't write it mark each answer against its own criterion before it goes.
That last step is what a bid review does for a fixed fee, and it's the one most likely to get squeezed out by the deadline. If the answers themselves need writing, that is tender writing for companies.
The last step is the one the deadline eats
Send the pack and the criteria
You hear back within 24 hours. If you send a deadline, you hear inside one working day whether we can meet it, and that comes before you pay anything.