Bid Manager

Location: Farnborough, Boscombe Down, Bristol, Porstmouth or Malvern

Role Type: Full-time / Permanent, Hybrid working patterns available

Role ID: 18349

QinetiQ is looking for an appropriately experienced Bid Manager to join our focused and successful professional Business Winning team in the UK Intelligence Sector. The types of bids you will manage will be varied, across different domains, including National Security, Cyber, Defence, as well as Science and Technology. You will play a pivotal role in orchestrating the bid team to secure new business to meet QinetiQ’s growth targets.

As a Bid Manager you will be responsible for leading bids following Pre-Sales Qualification. You will support Pre-Bid activities and lead the Bidding phase through to Preferred Bidder and Contract Award, working with a Capture Manager and multi-disciplined team developing a tender response that meets both cost and time constraints. This is a challenging and rewarding role. Key to its success is developing a compliant, high quality, compelling response that clearly articulates our solution approach and benefits, with associated differentiators and win themes. It involves leadership and strong stakeholder management, engaging with the business winning functions (sales, technical, project management, supply chain, people, finance and commercial) to gain early buy-in.

QinetiQ operates a flexible working policy which allows you to mix home based and office based working, depending on the demands of the business winning opportunity – agreed with your functional manager. You will be allocated to a QinetiQ base site at either, Malvern, Bristol, Farnborough, Lincoln, Amesbury or Portsmouth.

What you will be doing:

• Leading a bid team to produce responses to PQQs, ITTs, ITNs and some framework bids e.g. EDP, DIPS, DOS6.0 and WSRF under challenging timescales
• Managing virtual bid teams made up of QinetiQ staff, partner and supplier organisations
• Managing the bid within an agreed budget and customer driven timescale
• Supporting the Capture/Sales lead in Pre-Bid activities such as Customer Intelligence, Competitive Analysis, Solution Workshops and PtW reviews.
• Challenging the team to focus on how we are going to win – keeping the attention on a baselined solution, answering the question and delivering the optimum balance of price versus the technical score of our response.
• Working with the Capture/Sales Lead to ensure we properly understand the customer pain points and clearly represent our solution, win themes and discriminators in our responses.
• Establishing positive working relationships with all relevant functions, proactively solving issues in a collaborative manner during the bid.
• Managing the storyboarding process and proposal production with a strong eye on the quality of the outputs, ensuring the questions are answered and win themes are used.
• Managing the graphics production process, including selecting and appointing a graphics resource to render graphics, coordinating with the authors and graphics artist.
• Coordinating the proposal Book Plan and Tracking Matrix, monitoring and scoring progress of response development and writing, getting ready for reviews.
• Facilitating and supporting Pink Team and Red Team reviews to inform PWin, ensuring a compliant, compelling and high quality tender response is submitted.
• Communicating clearly with the bid team through regular stand-up meetings and key briefings at different stages of the bid.
• Initiating and tailoring the PLF assurance process to achieve Technical Excellence/Performance Excellence and other functional approvals, prior to Decision Point governance sign off.
• Supporting the improvement of the overall bid process through a LFE review.

You will have:

• Strong leadership skills, with an energetic and enthusiastic approach.
• Good planning skills and an organised and methodical approach to meeting deadlines.
• Ability to work under pressure and meet short time scales.
• Track record of working in a complex bid environment (~ 3+ years), demonstrating you have won bids in the past 12-18 months.
• Proven track record of successfully leading bid teams to meet proposal submit deadlines.
• Good communication, organisation and collaborative skills.
• Good understanding of Shipley colour review processes.
• Good understanding of pain points, win themes and discriminators.
• Experience in bids involving managing partners/sub-contractors.
• Setting up and running a collective working environment e.g. SharePoint and Kahootz.
• Ability to build relationships and brief senior management on the bid
• Experience of using AI in the development of tender response draft documents
• Knowledge of Government procurement processes ITT/ITNs, MEAT, VfM etc.
• APMP Qualification

Why Join QinetiQ?

As we continue to grow into new markets around the world, there’s never been a more exciting time to join QinetiQ. The formula for success is our appetite for innovation and having the courage to take on a wide variety of complex challenges.

As a QinetiQ employee, you’ll experience a unique working environment where teams from different backgrounds, disciplines and experience enjoy collaborating widely and openly as we undertake this exciting and rewarding journey. Through effective teamwork, and pulling together, you’ll get to experience what happens when we all share different perspectives, blend disciplines, and link technologies; constantly discovering new ways of solving complex problems in a diverse and inclusive environment where you can be authentic, feel valued and realise your full potential. Visit our website to read more about our diverse and inclusive workplace culture. www.qinetiq.com/en/careers/life-at-qinetiq

Our Benefits:

• Matched contribution pension scheme, with life assurance
• Generous holiday allowance, with the option to purchase additional days
• Options to join Health Cash Plan, Private Medical Insurance and Dental Insurance
• Employee discount portal: Personal Accident Insurance, Travel Insurance, Restaurants, Cinema Tickets and much more
• We are proud to support the Armed Forces community by honouring the Armed Forces Covenant and maintaining our Gold Award standard in the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme
• Volunteering Opportunities - helping charities and local community

Our Recruitment Process:

We want to make sure that our recruitment process is as inclusive as possible and we aspire to bring out the best in our candidates by creating an environment where everyone feels value, heard and supported. If you have a disability or health condition that may affect your performance in certain assessment types, please speak to your Recruiter about potential reasonable adjustments.

Many roles in QinetiQ are subject to national security vetting being completed, applicants who already hold the appropriate level of vetting may be able to transfer it upon appointment. A number of roles are also subject to additional restrictions, which mean factors such as nationality or previous nationalities may affect the roles that you can be employed in.

For further information on National Security Vetting please see link below:

UKSV National Security Vetting Solution: guidance for applicants - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)