Client: Women’s Counselling and Therapy Service
Healthcare Sector: Mental Health
Project Category: Bid Planning, Writing & Management
Client: Women’s Counselling and Therapy Service
Healthcare Sector: Mental Health
Project Category: Bid Planning, Writing & Management
Bidding Ltd and Women’s Counselling and Therapy Service (WCTS) are longstanding partners. We have worked together since late 2019, supporting them in their tendering needs due to a lack of capacity, resource, and tender experience.
This project covered Therapy and Counselling Services for Women in Leeds. As the incumbent provider, WCTS engaged our support for the Market Sounding Exercises, which were short tender-like responses to discuss how they would approach the service.
Our knowledge and experience of bid management were essential to WCTS. We understand the complexities of taking on the challenges associated with bids. Bid administration is built into our project timelines, enabling clients with fewer resources to submit excellent, compliant content, on time, every time.
We were able to lead WCTS smoothly through this unusual tender process that would otherwise have been a significant challenge to their time and resource.
We delivered tailored, comprehensive bid management support alongside compelling content creation from the start of this unusually complex procurement exercise to suit the specific needs of WCTS and the tender requirements.
This included portal management, clarification question management, support on tender documentation and certificates, writing and editing of the tender responses and submission on their behalf.
Immediately, we provided proactive support on areas that we knew were unknown to WCTS prior to the project, before issues or stress occurred. For example, we walked them through the requirements of the Social Value Portal, making suggestions and recommendations based on our previous experience of supporting National Themes, Outcomes, and Measures (TOMs) commitments.
By understanding that this project would be delivered alongside their day-to-day service delivery, we were able to be flexible, accommodating WCTS’ busy schedules while they continued frontline service delivery. This included measures such as arranging project meetings to meet WCTS need and supporting out of normal working hours communications where it enabled an efficient, productive working relationship.
Prior to the Pink Team, we conducted a comprehensive gap analysis exercise using our existing knowledge and dedicated WCTS bid library to highlight key areas that required more detail or had no previous content. This extensive pre-meeting work ensured that we delivered a targeted, condensed Pink Team that guided WCTS’ thinking, removing stress and minimising the time spent away from delivering their service. Similarly, we deviated from our usual Red Team process, receiving track changes to the written responses prior to the meeting.
Our final workshop drew together the previous three into a session focused on designing the service. By drawing on the overarching service vision, we were able to articulate through lines that needed to be present. Combining these with example patient journeys helped the client team to visualise the way in which their service would improve the health and wellbeing of people in that local area.
The main success of this project was to support a well- deserving client that genuinely makes a difference to their service users lives to submit a compliant, compelling tender response, which they would not have been able to do without considerable stress and difficulties if not for our support.
We successfully reduced the time they needed to spend on the tender project, enabling them to focus their attention, rightfully, on the therapy and counselling services that they deliver for the women of Leeds. Their inexperience of tendering would also have meant an extensive amount of stress, which we minimised by managing the whole tender process for them in an efficient and streamlined way.
This included tender response writing, editing, portal and clarification question management, and the often- intimidating portal upload.
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