Job Description

The Role:

The overall purpose of the role is to contribute to support the planning and management of work winning activities, including bid writing. The focus of the role is to increase the quality of submissions (EOIs, PQQs, ITTs and other proposals) issued by our Consulting business with a view to growing the proportion of successful tender submissions made by our teams across the country.

Core activities will include:

• Monitoring our pipeline and applying existing bid/no bid decision making processes to ensure a clear and rigorous assessment of opportunities.
• Working with bid teams to improve the quality of our submissions through better writing, effective use and promotion of Arup’s 12-Step Strategic Bidding Framework, and existing bid management and storage software.
• Working with subject matter experts and bid teams to track, plan and deliver high-quality submissions for new and emerging opportunities.
• Coordination and administration of complex submissions on behalf of bid teams that frequently include staff from multiple disciplines and locations.
• Drafting text as well as editing text produced by others, including text relating to standard question types and topics (i.e. H&S, sustainability, etc.).
• Maintaining and improving business development resources (CVs, project data and collateral, case studies, etc. in firmwide systems).
• Contributing to individual tender submissions is at the heart of this role, however its scope is wider and more strategic and includes influencing the strategy, structure and content of specific bids.
• The postholder will play a central role in influencing decisions taken by the group leaders and their senior team about opportunity selection, bid team composition and win strategy development.

The Bid Manager will:

• Monitor opportunity pipeline and coordinate with work winners across Consulting to build and manage the pursuit of major planning opportunities, support opportunity assessment and decision to proceed processes, shape and advise on the composition of bid teams, win strategies and bid programmes.
• Work with bid team members to develop robust answer plans.
• Write and edit key elements of high-value submissions, working both independently as well as collaboratively. Weview interim and final of some submissions, providing indicative scores and pragmatic edits that allow for valuable improvements prior to issue as well as challenging and advising on alignment across technical/ quality questions to remove internal contradictions within submissions and to strengthen overall coherence
• Participate in bid reviews and take on post-review actions to strengthen the submission further, prior to issue Apply best practice approaches to continually improve existing processes
• Work with client and business development colleagues across Arup UKIMEA to encourage greater and more effective use of work winning and client/market intelligence management systems, including win rate analysis
• Support relationship management through participation in the development and implementation of client plans

The role sits within the Consulting team and will report to the Leader with full alignment and engagement with the Regional Clients, Markets, and Communications / Clients and Business Development Team. This role is central to improving the quality and rigour of Consulting’s work winning activities.

Other important relationships include:
Consulting business development and group leaders, discipline and project leaders, business development and marketing team members, business support and visual communications colleagues.

Required Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities

A genuine passion for bidding. Significant experience – and success - in leading bid teams and making sustained and impactful contributions to submissions for major opportunities. An ability to undertake client and market research to inform opportunity assessment and selection processes, and to summarise and advise on based on disparate information drawn from the external environment. An ability to identify and structure disparate, internally-held data to support opportunity assessment and/or planned assessments. Experience, knowledge and qualification relevant to the analysis of information and the writing and editing of high-scoring technical text. Experience of UK procurement practice, standards and law pertaining to public sector organisations, publicly-funded agencies and/or major projects. Experience of one or more key UK economic sectors (construction, energy, water and/or transport) and of key players within them. Experience of leading and working within multidisciplinary bid teams. A personable, collaborative and resilient approach. An ability to draw out and communicate ideas effectively and creatively and a willingness to work collaboratively with colleagues to produce impactful, clear and compliant submissions. An ability to think calmly about work winning priorities and strategies. A competitive drive and dedication to achieve challenging deadlines.