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Lessons learned from the real world of bidding
Thought pieces and hard-won lessons from people running live bids, written up while the detail is still fresh.
01
What you will find here
Three kinds of piece, written by the people doing the work rather than by a marketing department.
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From the workshop
What we are building, and what we got wrong doing it.
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From the field
What our teams see on live bids, anonymised to the level a competitor could not identify.
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What is changing
The useful version of a regulatory change, without the press release.
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The entries
Eight so far, and one new piece a fortnight.
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From the field · 8 October 2026
What we heard at InnoTrans
Three days at InnoTrans 2026 talking to bid directors and engineers about AI in complex bidding, and what we can do about the problems they raised.
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What is changing · 10 September 2026
The in-house build
Large construction, infrastructure and rail firms keep attempting an in-house AI bidding tool. Among the early movers, we have yet to see one succeed.
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From the field · 6 September 2026
The document dump is not administrative. It is risk transfer.
Twelve hundred documents is not disorganisation. It is a decision somebody made about who carries the consequence.
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From the field · 6 September 2026
The test they set us
They had hidden a non-conformity in one of their own past bids. They did not tell us where.
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From the workshop · 6 September 2026
Why we score answers instead of marking them up
A customer explained this to us better than we had explained it to ourselves.
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From the workshop · 6 September 2026
Why the system will not price your work
Four customers in four unrelated sectors have asked. The answer is no, and it is worth explaining why rather than saying so politely.
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What is changing · 6 September 2026
Social value is being evidenced, not asserted
The weighting was never the hard part. Proving what you said you would do is.
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From the field · 6 September 2026
It is the queue, not the clock
Across eleven organisations, nobody said they did not have enough time. They described a backlog, which is a different problem with a different fix.
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Keep up with it
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