Question

You work for a medium-sized IT consulting firm in Quebec. You submit the lowest bid to design and deliver the software to automate and track inventory for a large grocery chain’s warehouse. As of today, you do not have the staffing in place to meet the contract and you anticipate that it will take three months longer than your main competitor to build the IT infrastructure awarded in the contract. Your client asks you to provide the details of your delivery schedule before awarding the contract to you or your main competitor, who has submitted a slightly higher but still competitive bid. What do you do?

a) Indicate that your schedule is “basically the same” as what you believe your competitor’s is to build the infrastructure.

b) Commit to completing the job in the same timeframe as your competitor and tell your internal team that they must shorten their timeframe by three months or else.

c) Ignore the scheduling question and focus on the quality of your firm’s work and the lowest cost component of your bid.

d) Admit that your schedule is longer than your competitor’s but reconfirm the quality of your work and hope that you don’t lose too many points in the evaluation process.

Answer 1

Option d is the most appropriate response because it will ensure the transparency between the partners and avoid any unwanted surprises for the client. It is better to lose the contract than be labelled for unreliability, false promises and shoddy work ( if company chooses to work fast without caring for quality to meet deadline) and a probable lawsuit or penalties later. The emphasis on assurance of high quality and the honest approach to the admission of constraints might score in favour of the company and lead to award of contract.