Whose dates are in your mobilisation plan?

A mobilisation plan sets out how a supplier will get from contract award to service start, and by when. It scores when its timeline counts back from this buyer’s service start date, and when each date and name in it comes from the people who will deliver the contract. In our view, the costliest failure is a timeline reused from the last bid. It tells the evaluator nothing about this contract, and it commits your organisation to dates its operations team has not agreed.

What you need before you start

Gather the tender’s inputs and line up the people who will run the contract before you write a word. The plan describes work that delivery teams carry out after award, in the stage between award and contract start. In APMP’s process model, the post-bid stage hands the work to those teams once the contract is awarded. Implementation then puts people, tools, and systems in place and works to a schedule with milestones.

From the tender, you need the mobilisation question, its award criteria, the service start date, and any information the buyer gives on the current service. From the business, you need the operations lead who would run the contract (the team, the sites, and the dates), HR (recruitment and any staff you take over), and IT (systems).

These people are the subject matter experts for this answer, and they also run live contracts. Their time is the dependency your plan waits on, so ask for it as soon as the bid is a go.

Read what this buyer means by mobilisation

Read the mobilisation question, its award criteria, and the specification for what this buyer counts as mobilisation, and answer that scope. A mobilisation plan commonly holds a timeline from award to service start, with dated milestones. It also sets out the people and resources each stage needs and who leads each stage, and where the contract changes hands, it covers the handover from the outgoing supplier.

Suppose your bid team is answering a tender for cleaning and facilities services across a buyer’s sites. An outgoing supplier runs the service today, and its cleaning staff will move to the new supplier with the contract. The tender sets the date the service must start and asks a scored quality question on mobilisation, with its own award criteria and word limit. Read that question and its criteria for what they ask about taking over the cleaning staff, and for the part the buyer itself plays in mobilisation. Evaluators score your cleaning answer against them, as with every scored question in a tender bid, so a plan built for another buyer’s scope loses quality marks on a weighted question.

In SEQUESTO aOS, Agent Force’s specialist agents pull the mobilisation question, its evaluation criteria, and its word limit out of the cleaning tender into the project. You confirm that structure before anyone starts drafting.

Build the timeline back from the start date

Start at the service start date in the tender and work back to award, giving each milestone a date or week and an owner. Each date comes from the subject matter expert who will do the work: operations for the team and the sites, HR for recruitment and vetting, and IT for systems. Name each owner by role, so the evaluator can see who does what by which date.

Group the milestones into stages: the weeks before go-live, go-live itself, and the first weeks of service. Stages let the evaluator follow the timeline at a glance.

For the cleaning tender, the table starts from the buyer’s service start date and counts back, row by row, to award. The operations manager who would run the contract gives the dates for the cleaning team and the sites, and confirms each row as it goes in. HR and IT supply their rows on the same terms.

Before submission, the operations manager approves the finished table, every date and name in it, because a date operations has not agreed is a start your organisation may not be able to deliver, in an answer that may bind it.

In SEQUESTO, you set the operations manager as the approver on the mobilisation question, and they approve the table inside the workflow. The audit trail then shows who approved it and when.

Plan the handover from the outgoing supplier

Where the contract changes hands, plan what you take over from the outgoing supplier, such as its staff, knowledge, or data, and how the service keeps running through the switchover. Give each handover step a date in the timeline, because those dates depend on information you receive from the outgoing supplier, and continuity at the buyer’s sites depends on the handover.

The buyer’s information on the outgoing supplier’s cleaning staff is where those dates begin. Your milestone table gets a row for receiving the full staff details and a row for taking the staff on before the service starts.

In the UK, for example, the outgoing employer must give the incoming one information on the transferring staff at least 28 days before the transfer, or as soon as reasonably practicable where special circumstances prevent that. There, each employer must also inform the representatives of affected staff long enough before the transfer to allow consultation, so those steps need their own dates before service start.

Name the risks and what the buyer must do

List the risks specific to this contract, each with the action that handles it and the person who owns it. A risk to the start date, for instance, names the milestone it threatens, the step that protects that milestone, and the role that takes the step.

Set out the buyer’s part with dates as well: the meetings, approvals, and information you need from them. For each approval, give the date you need it by and the milestone that waits on it. A late approval or missing information from the buyer moves your start, so naming that dependency in the plan shows it to the buyer before the contract is signed.

Show a contract start you have delivered

Cite a contract start your organisation has delivered that resembles this one, giving its scope and what happened, and use only what your records show. Choose it against the mobilisation question’s criteria, because a case study that misses them costs more than citing none, which is how a competent bid can still lose marks. A close match on the kind of service and the handover it involved gives the evaluator something to compare with this contract.

In SEQUESTO, a search of the evidence library by meaning returns ranked matches for the mobilisation question, each with a confidence score. A low score shows your team that a matching contract start may not be on record yet.

Fit the plan to the word limit

Put the milestones, their dates, and their owners in a table, and keep prose for the handover and the risks. The word or page limit on a scored question leaves no room for generic process, so every line has to carry this contract’s dates, people, and handover. A table also lets the evaluator check each milestone and its owner in one look. Add a Gantt chart where the tender’s instructions allow one and it shows dependencies the table cannot.

Mobilisation plan checklist

• The plan answers every part of this tender’s mobilisation question and its award criteria.
• Every milestone has a date or week and an owner, counted back from the service start date.
• The operations manager who will run the contract has approved every date and name.
• Where the contract changes hands, each handover step has a date.
• Each named risk has an action and an owner.
• The meetings, approvals, and information you need from the buyer have dates.
• The evidence cites a contract start your organisation delivered that resembles this one.
• The answer fits the word or page limit, with the milestones in a table.

Before anyone drafts, book the operations manager’s time for the dates.