Tendering in construction is… different

It starts with a Request for Proposal and ends with a bid deliverable.

Tendering in construction looks simple from the outside. But everyone who has lived through real bids knows the truth: everything in between is where projects are quietly won or lost.

You are not just filling out forms. You are:

• Interpreting what the client really wants

• Committing to risk you will live with for years

• Coordinating many disciplines and partners

• Doing all of it under time pressure, with incomplete information

Here is why tendering in construction is so different, and why treating it as "admin" can prove to be a costly mistake.

1. Every job is unique

2. Document heavy by nature

3. Compliance heavy by default

4. Risk allocation and transfer define the game

5. Fast and high stakes

1. Every job is unique

Most industries work with repeatable products, standard offerings or within clear risk limitations. Construction does not, as every major tender comes with its own mix of:

• Site conditions and logistics

• Local context and stakeholders

• Contract model and risk profile

• Authorities, utilities and neighbours

• Partner and subcontractor landscape

You might be working with a familiar client or region, but the actual configuration is new every time.

That means you cannot just copy and paste last year’s solution. You have to re-build the story of how you will deliver, the division of responsibilities and interfaces, and the risk picture and pricing logic. Tendering is where you turn a messy set of constraints into something deliverable and bankable. That is much closer to project design than to form filling.

2. Document heavy by nature

Tendering is text heavy by design. A typical major tender combines:

• RFPs and instructions to tenderers

• Technical specifications and standards

• Drawings and BIM exports

• Q&A logs, clarifications and addenda

• Contract forms, special conditions and annexes

It is easily thousands of pages. Studies of construction execution show that teams already spend around 35 percent of their time on non optimal activities like looking for project information, fixing mistakes and dealing with rework, adding up to more than 14 hours per week per person and billions in wasted labour cost. (Autodesk)

Tendering has the same pattern in compressed form: time spent hunting for the latest spec or clarification, parallel versions of the bid circulating in different teams, and critical requirements hiding in annexes or minutes.

The visible cost is late nights, stress and duplicated work. The hidden cost is when something important is never found at all.

3. Compliance heavy by default

Every serious construction tender is a compliance exercise as much as it is a creativity exercise.

Each bid comes with its own blend of national and local codes, client standards and technical policies, project specific requirements, and public procurement rules. You are not just asking "did we tick all the boxes", you are really asking:

• Did we respond to the criteria in the way the client actually evaluates them?

• Are our methods and assumptions consistent with the standards and regulations that actually apply?

On top of that you need to avoid making promises that later clash with permits or regulatory practice. One overlooked clause in one annex can break compliance, expose you to sanctions, or simply make you uncompetitive on evaluation.

Getting compliance right is really about traceability. You need to be able to answer:

Where does this requirement come from?
Where in our bid do we actually respond to it?
Can we prove that link in a review or audit?

That is hard to do when requirements and responses live in separate silos and different teams maintain their own "truth".

4. Risk allocation and transfer define the game

Tendering is where you lock in a large part of your future risk.

Across legal and technical sections in the documents you will find how the project allocates ground and geotechnical risk, utilities and access, third party interfaces, performance guarantees and availability, liquidated damages, bonus or penalty regimes, and insurance, indemnities and liabilities. This is not abstract. It decides:

• What you are responsible for if something goes wrong

• How often you will end up in dispute territory and how much margin you realistically have a chance of keeping

Clients push risk down. Contractors try to manage or share it. Subcontractors receive a filtered version of the story.

Tendering is the real negotiation phase where you decide which risks you accept as they are, which ones you qualify, condition or price differently, and which ones you push back on or seek clarifications for. If you cannot see the full risk picture in the documents while you are bidding, you are effectively negotiating blind.

5. Fast and high stakes

On top of everything else, tendering is always on the clock.

Bid windows are short, information arrives late and in fragments, clarifications change assumptions half way through, and internal reviews, partners and approvals all need time. You are making long lived commitments under real time pressure. One misunderstood obligation can easily erase the fee.

Because of that pressure, teams build local shortcuts: extra spreadsheets that do not fully align with the formal bid, email threads that never make it back into the main document set, and "we will fix that later" assumptions that survive into contract and execution. The result is often a bid that looks technically impressive, but is internally fragile:

• Requirements are not fully traced to responses

• Risk positions are not consistently reflected across documents

Partners may not be fully aligned on what has actually been promised. That fragility tends to show up later, on site or in disputes, when it is a lot more expensive to fix.

Tendering is not paperwork. It is virtual project execution.

Put these pieces together and a pattern appears.

Tendering in construction is essentially running the project in documents first, making a series of irreversible decisions under uncertainty, and locking in scope, risk and commercial position before you ever mobilise on site.

In practice, the tender phase is where you define what you are really committing to deliver, how risk and responsibility are distributed, and what margin you realistically have a chance of keeping.

Done well, tendering is virtual project execution: a controlled, traceable decision process.

Done badly, it is a rushed document exercise that quietly seeds problems into execution.

Where Volve fits

At Volve, this is what we work on every day.

We connect documents with intelligence so tender teams can:

• See requirements, clarifications, standards and internal inputs in context

• Trace how obligations, risks and assumptions flow across the tender set

• Spot conflicts, gaps and overlaps before they turn into problems

• Reuse past experience and feedback to strengthen new bids

The goal is simple:

Help teams control information, see the whole picture earlier and decide with confidence.

Tendering in construction will always be complex. But it does not have to be hard to see or hard to understand.

Read more about why good tendering in construction isn’t “paperwork”, but virtual project execution here.