Consulting: Workshops

When Is a Workshop Necessary?

• Proposal/Tender Project Kick-off
• Development of proposal strategy and win themes
• Bid, No-Bid, Stakeholder and Competitor Analyses
• Pricing Strategy
• At a Project Road Block
• At significant milestones to check progress
• Whenever required to reach a clear goal

Need to get a project kick-started? Want your stakeholders on one page? Hit a roadblock? Running a focused, well-designed workshop can be an valuable catalyst for change.

A well-designed workshop has little in common with time-wasting, expensive meetings. Properly planned with a clear and managed agenda, they are powerful forums in which to break through issues and harness the creative juices required to solve a problem or pave the way forward.

Even the most active and inventive of minds can be forced into a malaise in the face of responding to tenders, proposals, bids and pitches. A facilitated workshop will remove that torpor, leaving you clear to tap into the thoughts and ideas of others. It remains a truism: 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts'.

Many organisations become distracted trying to analyse and interpret the tender document to identify the subliminal messages. And so the opportunity for creative problem-solving and development of innovative solutions are lost, or at best, a hit and miss affair.

Tender Success' consultants have seen firsthand the considerable value of using workshops to challenge the issues that choke progress. Using these collaborative events, we challenge the issues head-on, leading to the kind of plans and actions which win business.

Some examples are:

• realisation that the client's relationship team was failing - at the risk of losing business worth $350 million pa
• development and deployment of a web-based solution to record and share benchmarking data
• creation and sponsorship of a panel of industry experts to provide ongoing innovation an thought leadership
• provision of a vender-sponsored scholarship and development of a University training course to address an identified shortage of skilled workers

What Are the Benefits of holding a Workshop?

• Your solutions become more effective because they are created, understood and owned by the people impacted
• You gain cross-organisation understanding and buy-in, both for opportunities and proposal processes
• Your Proposal Team becomes re-energised and the team members realigned
• Your key players regain focus and objectivity- especially when tight deadlines and limited resources threaten a quality response

How Do They Work?

Of course, workshops can be facilitated at various stages of a tender response, but from our experience, a well-established 'kick-off' workshop will set the tone for any tender response. Done well, they really inspire teams and ignite innovation; done poorly, they can demoralise teams and lead to cut-and-paste submissions.

Core elements of successful workshops are:

• Appropriate Planning
• Inviting the right people
• A 'neutral' facilitator to guide the process and ask the difficult questions
• A succinct agenda sent out in advance including:
  • Workshop Purpose
  • Timeframes and Intended Outcomes for Each Item
• A review of the workshop purpose and agenda right at the start
• Use of a timer to guide discussions and to keep the meeting on track
• Establish ground rules - Team Code of Conduct
• Use of a Parking Board - to 'park' information either for later or for follow up.
• The creation of an Action List
• A review of discoveries at close