The Assessment Bid Project Manager is responsible for managing the end to end bid process in RM Assessment. This includes planning all activities and resources in relation to each bid, managing communications with the customer and day to day coordination of the bid team to ensure RM provide compelling proposals, commercial solutions, pilots, demonstrations and presentations in response to each bid. They are also responsible for ensuring adherence to divisional and RM group governance processes at every stage of the bidding process and that a register is maintained of decisions and outcomes.

RM Assessment works on about 25 competitive bids per year ranging in value from £50k up to £15m. Most will follow a structured competitive tender process that will span 4-8 weeks. The Assessment Bid Project Manager will work in a team of 2-3 Bid Project Managers to coordinate the management of this workload.

At RM we provide technology and resources to the education sector, supporting schools, teachers and learners, with one goal, to improve education outcomes worldwide. What we do helps all levels of the industry, from preschool to higher education and professional qualification, our customers include schools, examination boards, central governments and other professional institutions. We have a clear purpose to enrich the lives of learners worldwide.

To better reflect the society that we serve, we’re committed to building a diverse workforce and creating an inclusive and welcoming environment for all. To achieve this, we create teams of talented people from different backgrounds and experiences and strive to be a business where our people can bring their whole selves to work.

Bid/Proposal Planning and Management:

• Point of contact for customer communication throughout the bid.
• Create and maintain the bid workbook to manage deliverables, plans and responses.
• Create and maintain the bid plan aligned with the customer tender process.
• Identify necessary stakeholders and resources to support the bid.
• Lead the bid Kick Off meeting with the core bid team and stakeholders.
• Organise and lead bid team touchpoints to track and monitor progress to plan.
• Drive and facilitate governance touchpoints in line with governance processes and the bid plan.
• Ensuring governance is followed in line with company policy throughout the opportunity lifecycle.
• Capture and manage actions from bid team, steering and governance meetings to desired outcome.
• Risk and commitment capture; ensuring mitigation and business agreement.
• Creating writing and response templates to support each tender response.
• Coordinate writers and reviewers for all proposal content.
• Track proposal development progress and drive team members to meet deadlines.
• Ensure proposal quality through proofing and formatting.
• Compile final proposal documentation (including hardcopy printed submissions).
• Submit final proposal.
• Facilitate Lessons Learnt sessions and feed improvements back into the business.

Governance Management:

• Work with the Head of Growth Enablement to maintain a Governance Process for bids, proposals and change controls that supports RM Group governance rules and is appropriate to inform and engage the RM Assessment Senior Leadership Team in all spend decisions and commitments.
• Document and communicate Governance processes across the RM Assessment team to ensure everyone is familiar with the processes, rules, templates and forums.
• Support the wider RM Assessment team to prepare, book and deliver governance and checkpoint content according to the defined processes and standards.
• Facilitate and chair governance and checkpoint meetings ensuring that integrity of the meetings and process are maintained. This includes ensuring that necessary attendees are invited, information is prepared and shared in advance, meetings run to time and schedule, actions are captured in a governance register and minutes are shared.
• Maintain a bid register documenting all meetings, attendees, actions and outcomes.

Bid Process Ownership:

• Own and maintain a repeatable bid workbook template that supports the standard bid management processes and tools.
• Maintain templates for key governance and checkpoint meetings.
• Facilitate resource planning meeting for bid activities to ensure bid team resources are regularly planned and tracked with resource owners and Business Development Managers.
• Support the compilation and maintenance of a Bid Library of standard responses and quality, brand aligned response document templates that speed up the bid writing process.
• Demonstrate best practice bid process management in every bid.
• Maintain a continuous improvement mentality, learning from each bid and adapting processes accordingly.
• Maintain a win / loss record of all bids. Liaise with customers to seek feedback from each bid and compile reports of outcomes and trends to support Leadership reporting and inform investment and improvement activities based on market feedback on RM’s proposals.

Opportunity Tracking:

• Monitor ‘bid tracker’ tools and wider market news to seek opportunities coming to market that match RM’s propositions and are worth qualification.
• Track expected bids through bid portals and bid email folders to ensure RM pick them up promptly as the come to market.
• Monitor bid email folders to pick up on any market news or enquiries and share across the Business Growth team as needed.

• Project Management: experience creating project plans and successfully delivering to strict deadlines with multi-disciplinary teams.
• Qualifications: Professional qualification and/or training in one or more recognised project management process is desirable
• Planning and organisation: Excellent understanding of what is involved in developing, communicating and delivering a project plan for a multi-disciplinary team – coordinating and tracking tasks across a team simultaneously, accurately and according to priority.
• Customer focus: customer facing experience and professionalism in a commercial working relationship.
• Delegation, collaboration and influencing: using strong influencing skills to work with a variety of stakeholders (inside and outside RM) to ensure a positive, effective and collaborative team culture that delivers results.
• Communication: professional, presentable, dependable and self-motivated. Excellent interpersonal and team working skills. Experience of building positive working relationships with senior leadership teams.
• Driven: being brave in making sound recommendations based on fact and experience, with a focus on tangible results-orientated outcomes.
• Tenacious and self-motivated: someone who is curious, yet disciplined; who does not need to be told what to do but seeks to contribute; someone who is tenacious and looks for alternatives.
• Senior Leadership Influencer – confident and professional in chairing meetings with Senior Leadership. Speaking up to drive agenda to a schedule, listening and gauging the tone of discussion and clearly capturing and communicating actions and outcomes.
• Reporting: comfortable analysing lessons learnt and customer feedback from bids to capture and report conclusions and metrics.

What’s in it for you?