Excellence Self-Assessment Behind a Bid
Your engineering group is bidding for a €300m rail depot public-private partnership. The tender requires bidders to evidence 'project excellence' and past delivery performance, and last year a comparable bid lost points on 'management approach'. The board has asked you, as PMO lead, to run a self-assessment against the IPMA Project Excellence Baseline in eight weeks and turn it into bid content. Four project leaders are available for interviews; data quality is mixed, with good cost records but inconsistent schedule and stakeholder metrics. One flagship project suffered a serious lost-time safety incident eighteen months ago, which was reported to the client and led to a site-wide stand-down. The bid director wants the incident left out. Commercial has already drafted a 'lessons learned' page for the bid.
1. How would you use the PEB so that it improves the bid rather than producing a glossy brochure?
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The failure mode is well known: a self-assessment run backwards from a desired score, producing adjectives and no evidence. Bid evaluators see dozens of these.
Run it as a diagnostic, not a scoring exercise. PEB's structure separates enablers (leadership, people, policy and strategy, partnerships and resources, processes) from results (customer, people, society, and key performance). Score honestly across both, and treat every low score as a candidate improvement action rather than a reputational threat.
Extract bid content from the gaps, not the strengths. Evaluators score 'management approach' on whether you can describe how you find and fix weaknesses. A page saying 'we use lessons learned' is worth nothing; a page showing that this assessment identified three specific weaknesses in how you manage rail-interface stakeholders, and the named countermeasures, is worth a lot.
Involve the four project leaders as co-assessors, not interviewees. Their ownership is what makes the content credible in a clarification meeting, where evaluators ask unpredictable questions.
Separate the artefacts. Deliverable 1: an internal improvement plan with owners. Deliverable 2: bid text drawn from Deliverable 1. Reversing that order is how brochures get written.
Timebox by evidence availability. With eight weeks and mixed data, assess a defined scope - three reference projects - rather than attempting a group-wide score you cannot defend.
2. The bid director wants the safety incident omitted. What is your position?
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Omit it and you create a materially larger risk than the one you are hiding. It was reported to the client and resulted in a site-wide stand-down; it is discoverable in reference checks, in the client's own records, and from any of the 60-odd people who worked the site. A bid that conceals a known incident and is then caught fails on integrity, not on safety.
Reframe it as a results criterion rather than an enabler failure. PEB's results criteria ask what happened and what changed; assessors distinguish between organisations with an incident and organisations with no systemic response. Present: root cause, the stand-down, the specific systemic changes made, and the subsequent measurable performance - for example lost-time frequency over the 18 months since, audit findings, and any client-verified improvement.
Test the claim. If the 18 months of data do not show improvement, then the honest answer is that the improvement plan is immature, and that should shape what you bid, not just how you write it.
Handle the bid director politically. Do not argue about ethics in the abstract; give them the risk in their language - a clarification question they cannot answer, or a reference call that contradicts the bid. Offer a jointly drafted paragraph so the decision is shared rather than imposed.
Escalate only if overruled. If overruled in writing, note it; do not let the PMO's name sit on a concealment it advised against.
3. Data quality is uneven. How do you produce results that will survive evaluator scrutiny in eight weeks?
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Evaluators do not require perfect data; they penalise unexplained data. Three practical moves:
1. Define before you measure. Agree a one-page KPI dictionary - what 'on-time' means, from which date, at what tolerance - before pulling numbers. Most credibility failures in bids come from two figures in the same document that use different definitions.
2. Triangulate the weak measures. For schedule, which is your weak area, cross-check against client acceptance records, milestone certificates and the contractor's own reporting. Where the three disagree, report the range and say why, rather than the most flattering number.
3. Prefer externally verified evidence. Client satisfaction letters, third-party audits, regulatory sign-offs and independent assurance reports carry more weight in a public tender than an internally produced percentage. With four project leaders and eight weeks, five externally verifiable results outperform twenty internal ones.
4. Disclose the basis of every figure. A short note on sample, period and source converts a suspicious number into a defensible one. Conversely, a single unexplained 98% destroys confidence in every other number on the page.
5. Use the PEB results criteria to structure the answer - customer, people, society and key performance - so that the response covers outcomes the evaluator cares about rather than only the ones you happen to measure. Where you have no data for a criterion, say so and describe the measurement you are putting in place: a gap you have identified and instrumented is a weaker answer than a result, but far stronger than silence.