At Tendered, we live and breathe sales proposals. Our goal is to design content to best communicate to every stakeholder that might be evaluating the proposal for a tender bid. For this reason, we have a few hacks we use to cut down the investment involved in creating visual graphics within our documents.These tactics are implemented when providing clients with our proposal writing service.
Organisational & Flow Charts
It isn’t a public sector tender without an organisational chart. But poorly designed or low quality charts in tender documentation are common practice. Most create their charts in word, excel or some other platform not fit-for purpose.
But what if there was another way? Here is the charting software that makes it easy to piece together complex organisational or contract management supplements:
Lucidchart
Lucidchart is a simple, easy to use platform that allows for quick development and manipulation of charts and other graphics.
The platform allows for drag & drop elements, colour coding, and lines of responsibility (including varied line types for reporting types).
You can also use the software to create flow charts quickly using a panel of chart elements to visually depict processes, procedures and other systems.
Data & Graphics
When you’re submitting tenders, you have to be aware of all the personality types and learning styles of each of your potential stakeholders. That means that varied methods of communication are critical to delivering your salient points. Visualised data and graphic components are one way of communicating to stakeholders that prefer visual depictions.
There are a number of great graphics programs such as the Adobe suite, but they can be costly and difficult to use. More recently, online platforms such as Canva and Adobe Spark have made creating graphics much easier.
Project Management Charts
Most tenders require some kind of implementation, project management or delivery plan which involves a plethora of variables, stages and timeframes. Often, companies use internal systems or other processes that might not visually depict the quality of the process. For this reason, we utilise visual resources such as Gantt and resourcing charts to project the proposed plan.
Most people avoid creating these kinds of visual plans as they are rarely used and take a lot of time to establish. It’s also necessary to adapt timeframes and tasks to the particular contract requirements.
Team Gantt
Team Gantt allows you to create a complex and thorough Gantt chart quickly and easily. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to:
- Enter data easily;
- Enter new tasks;
- Move and manipulate data;
- Change individual or group timeframes;
- Colour code tasks;
- Among other things.
The best thing about this software is that it enables you to manipulate group time frames. If your project stages don’t generally differ much, you can adjust the time frames of your entire project without much investment.
