Last reviewed: 4 October 2026
Start with eligibility and strategic fit
Check the buyer’s stated eligibility conditions, mandatory qualifications, location requirements, minimum experience and submission rules. A compelling opportunity is not worth pursuing if a pass/fail condition cannot be met. Then ask whether the work fits your organisation’s capability, priorities and target customers, and what is actually known about this buyer’s needs.
Separate confirmed facts from assumptions. Where a requirement is ambiguous, note a question for the formal clarification channel rather than assuming a favourable interpretation.
Test capacity and evidence
Check that the proposed solution meets the buyer’s needs and that you can demonstrate the claimed capability. Map the people, specialist input, partner commitments and time needed to prepare a credible response and then deliver if successful. Check whether approved case studies, references, qualifications, financial information and technical evidence exist in the form the buyer asks for.
Consider competing deadlines and whether reviewers can approve the bid before the submission cut-off. A missing piece of evidence may be resolvable; an unavailable qualified delivery team may not be.
In practice: If the deadline is ten working days away and two named experts are unavailable, the team should identify a realistic alternative before treating the opportunity as viable.
Review the commercial and delivery case
Assess likely cost to bid, pricing room, delivery commitments, cash-flow implications, contract obligations, liability exposure and delivery risk. Consider how well positioned the team is against the competition and what it can genuinely differentiate. Commercial, contract and legal owners should review consequential assumptions and positions.
Record key unknowns and the clarifications that could change the decision; do not ask AI to decide whether the contract is acceptable or profitable.
Questions to check
- Can we meet every mandatory condition?
- Do we have the capacity and credible evidence to deliver?
- Is the commercial case supportable after bid and delivery costs?
- Who owns the decision and its unresolved conditions?
Make a decision that can be revisited
Name the decision owner and document the reasons to bid, not bid or bid only if specified conditions are resolved. Assign owners and dates to the unknowns. Revisit the decision if an amendment changes scope, a clarification changes eligibility, a key resource becomes unavailable or the commercial case materially shifts.
AI can organise verified facts and questions, but cannot make the final bid/no-bid decision. That decision belongs to authorised people; a simple diagnostic does not replace specialist review.
How MethodBridge approaches this
Keep the working decision with people.
MethodBridge links bid/no-bid reasoning to the same requirements, owners, evidence and commercial controls used later in the tender lifecycle. A decision is a recorded gate, not an AI verdict.
This guidance is educational and must be adapted to the specific tender and your organisation’s requirements. Verify source information and keep technical, commercial and legal decisions with the responsible people.