The name of my dog…

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The name of my dog…

Singapore 22^nd September 2011

One of the most tedious processes is to respond to government tenders. Some one must have too much time on their hands in these departments as the amount of paperwork they sent out for you to study and reply to are scary to say the least. Some information that is being requested is so detailed that you wonder what they need it for. As I was going through the project write up, the submission demands and related questionaires so detailed I was prepared to find a question about what the name of my dog is. Not that I have one, but you know what I mean. All in the name of so called being able to evaluate the submissions
based on all these background “character” assessments. Sometimes I suspect it is pure curiousity using the tender to extract private and confidential information. I guess this can also be used as a reason to disqualify you if they “don’t like you”!…Hey! You did not specify the name of your dog, sorry disqualified!

I am exagerating but the amount of information to be provided is so intens that it will take more than a day to put it all together. There are a couple of tricky demands were they ask you to specify your fee per stage of work but at the same time elsewhere they ask you to provide a manpower chart for the duration of the project. In other words they can cross check your fee portions against the manpower proposed, so you need to balance this pretty sharply to avoid being caught out on price or manpower demands. Some stages are also presented as optional allowing the client to cut these out at later stages without major legal implications…

When I get these kind of tenders to respond to I am thorn between responding and just letting it go, just for the shear amount of work it represents and the relative chance of being successful in the process. But in this case we are asked as part of a larger consultants consortium with people we have worked with before and count on us to be part of the team so I guess we’ll do it…if only I had a dog and knew his name… 🙂

In Light Watch today a preview of Singapore’s Sports Hub, one of those gimongus government projects that are currently on the way. We did team up with one of the consortiums at the time but were not part of the winning team….