Are you actually ready to go to market?

Early in my procurement career, I was bright eyed, eager, and convinced I could conquer the world. Then a tender demand landed on my desk on a Tuesday. Fourteen sites, unknown current spend, "cleaning services as per attached schedule." The attached schedule was two lines long.

I remember sitting with it thinking, this isn't ready. But the client wanted it out that week. Firm deadline. So I threw what I had into a template and it went to market as is.

Six weeks later we had eleven submissions, all wildly different prices. Every supplier had priced a different guess at what "as per attached schedule" meant. One assumed daily cleaning. Another assumed three days a week. Nobody asked, because the query period closed before anyone realised how much they didn't know. We ended up re-scoping and re-tendering the whole thing. Twelve weeks lost. A client who had been promised a quick fix was now waiting on a redo, and a market that remembered us as the procurement team who wasted their time.

That is the real cost of a bad scope. It is never just the redo. It is the credibility you burn with every supplier who priced it properly the first time and got it wrong through no fault of their own.

A scope gap is not a small thing you fix in an addendum. It is the tender telling you, before you have spent a cent, that you are not ready to buy. Fix the scope first and the tender runs itself. Skip that step and you are just outsourcing your uncertainty to the market and hoping someone guesses right.

The five checks to always run before anything goes to market

I built this list the hard way, one bad tender at a time. It takes half a day. It saves months.

1. Site and asset detail. Every site listed with address and asset type. No "and similar sites" language. If a supplier cannot count what they are pricing, they will price it wrong.

2. Current spend or budget range. Even a rough figure. Suppliers price faster and more accurately when they know the ballpark, and you get a real signal if submissions come back wildly off it.

3. Service standard, not just service name. Frequency, hours, response times. "Cleaning services" is not a scope. "Daily office cleaning, five days a week, before 7am" is not perfect, but it’s better. Start with that and keep going!

4. What is explicitly excluded. Every scope gets read as generously as possible by the supplier trying to win. If something is out, say so in writing. Otherwise you are guaranteed to pay for things you don’t need or want.

5. Who answers questions, and when. A query period that closes before suppliers have had time to find the gaps defeats the purpose of having one.

If any of these five are missing, the tender is not ready. Full stop. That is not a judgement on the person who wrote the brief. It is just where the work is at.

What this looks like in practice

A property portfolio client came to us with a tender ready to issue, signed off internally and considered complete.

We ran it against the five checks first. Two gaps came up straight away. The asset register had not been updated in over a year, so the site list did not match what suppliers would actually be walking into. And response time requirements existed for emergency callouts but not routine maintenance, which meant every supplier would price routine work on their own assumptions.

Both gaps were fixed in four days. The tender went to market clean. Submissions came back consistent and gradeable within a week of close. No re-tender, no twelve-week detour. The client kept their original timeline and finished four weeks ahead of the date they had been braced for, because there was no rework to absorb.

That is the whole point of a scope review. Not more process. Less rework.

This is the work I do at QBE Consulting before every tender goes to market. A scope review, a plain readout of what is missing and why it matters, and a clear call on whether the document is ready to issue. Most clients are surprised by how fast it runs and how much time it buys back later.

If you have got a tender about to go out the door, message me first. It is a lot cheaper to find the gaps now than after eleven suppliers have already guessed.