Monday.com for bid and tender management

I developed processes for bid and tender management and uses 4 monday.com boards for every bid / tender I manage.

One board (DOCS) is holding all the documents relevant for the bid. These are incoming (saved directly into the monday.com platform) or documents the bid team is creating. The DOCS board uses automation for easing the process of reviewing content. After the author changes the status to “for review” the reviewer decides whether this is bonze or silver quality (or final which is gold). The status will be set back to “Assigned” and the document will be moved to the bronze, silver or gold group.

For document that will be created by the team I insert a shareable link in the “Edit Doc” column, this can be either a share link to Word / OneDrive or to Docs / GDrive. The advantage is that team members can open and edit documents directly from the monday.com environment and edit the documents multi user.

The second Board (PLAN) holds the planning and for every task that involves creating some sort of content I place a link to the relevant item in the DOCS board. The owner of the task can set the status of the task but also the status of the document (through a mirror column) directly from the PLAN board.

The third board (REGS) holds all relevant registers like: decisions, risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies. This board has board permissions so that the owner of the item can change status etc. This is the same board permission as for the PLAN and DOCS boards. As answering a bid / tender is a very intense team effort within a limited time frame it is important to keep all the communication in context of the item. In the bids I manage with monday.com I am trying to convince team members not to use email at all. The beauty of using the updates as communication is that in a later stage (eg after the bid has been won) other people can always see how a certain decision (or risk or anything else) evolved during the bid cycle.

The last board (MISC) is introduced to give team member a change to record anything they want (opportunity, risk, dependency etc etc). By using votes the bid manager sees how many team member agree and the bid manager than decides to make this a documented risk, issues or anything else). This MISC board is the only board which its board permissions open to edit content.

Finally I am using a dashboard to get an one glance overview of the bid. I am casting this dashboard to a large television screen in the bid room.

More about this dashboard can be found here: https://excellent-bid.nl/blog/a-live-dashboard-for-bid-management/

Using multiple boards for one solution (in my case 4 boards for 1 bid) is somewhat cumbersome with regards to keeping your members and guests in sync across all boards. Therefore I created a page on my website to do some basic admin stuff (like creating a set of boards, archiving a set of boards and inviting guests to a set of boards). This page use the V2 API to do those tasks. At the moment of writing everything is tested and in place except for some missing calls to the V2 API. I am in close contact with the API team to add the missing bits and pieces in the V2 API.

Anyone who needs to treat multiple boards as one solution and has access to a Wordpress site contact me and we can see if the solution I created suits your needs.

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Hey @basdebruin

Wow this sounds like a great use case!! The use of the multiple boards for the different stages of your bid management is really impressive.

Can you perhaps share some screenshots of your boards and automations set up so we can get a better understanding of how they look? You can of course redact any sensitive info or duplicate your boards’ templates and put in some dummy info for this purpose.

Can’t wait to learn more!