You Don’t Win a Construction Project Once. You Win It Twice. - Superior

In construction, we talk a lot about “winning the project”.

But you do not really win it once. You win it twice.

First in tendering, when you convince the client and sign the contract
Then in delivery, when you keep control of risk, scope and margin in real life

The uncomfortable truth is that many projects only win once.

The bid looks strong. The contract is signed. Then the real project starts, and the story changes.

Risk appears in places nobody saw. Scope turns out to mean something slightly different in practice. Interfaces are fuzzier than they looked on paper. Margin quietly erodes.

The decisions that cause this are almost never made on site.
They are made much earlier, in how you read, interpret and respond to contractual documents.

That is why we think about tenders, contracts and project execution as one continuum, not separate worlds.

The same decisions, two phases

Between RFP and submission, you decide:

What you are committing to deliver
What risk you accept, and on what terms
How you plan to execute the work

Those decisions are encoded in text:

RFP and clarifications
Your bid and assumptions
The signed contract, with its annexes, specs and standards

In delivery, you are living with exactly the same decisions, just under different labels:

Variations and claims
Change control and notices
Work packs, schedules, QA and reporting

If the information spine between those phases is broken, you get handover decks, manual re-interpretation, and a lot of “I think what they meant here was…”.

If it is kept intact, you get a much better chance of winning twice.

Where margin is really decided

A few things quietly carry through from tender into delivery, whether you manage them or not.

Risk drivers carry through

Risk drivers do not reset at contract award. What you saw – or missed – in the bid becomes real upside, or real downside, in execution.

If you understood where the client was hard on risk and where they were flexible, that understanding can inform:

How you set up your risk register
Where you put your best people
How you approach negotiation and change

If you did not, you find out the hard way.

Requirement detection becomes real obligations

In tendering, requirement detection looks like:

Finding every “shall” and “must” across RFP, specs, standards and clarifications
Mapping what is pass/fail and what is scored
Showing where your response actually answers each point

In delivery, the same work shows up as:

Knowing exactly what you are obliged to do in a given area or work pack
Being able to show where in the contract those obligations come from
Checking QA and changes against the right requirement set

If you skip requirement detection in tender, you are essentially guessing your obligation set in delivery.

Scope and price baseline

In tendering, you set your scope and price baseline:

What is included
What is excluded
What is clarified, conditional or assumed

If that is not captured and linked to the contract, you lose your baseline.

In delivery, that shows up as:

Arguments about “what was actually priced”
Unclear ownership of scope creep
Weak position when you try to justify variations

Locking a clear scope and price baseline is not only about winning the bid. It is about having something solid to stand on later.

Interfaces and dependencies

Utilities, third parties, client inputs, regulators, neighbours – they do not live in separate worlds.

In tendering, you identify:

Who owns which interface
What depends on which external decision or input
Where you need conditions, clarifications or different pricing

In delivery, the same interfaces become:

Pacing items in your schedule
Frequent pain points in meetings
Sources of delay, claims or mutual frustration

Owning interfaces from day one is one of the biggest differences between projects that stay in control, and projects that do not.

Execution understanding and planning

In the bid, you write:

Methods and sequencing
Access and logistics plans
Acceptance criteria and testing concepts

That is not marketing copy. It is your first execution model.

If that model is:

Thin
Internally inconsistent
Detached from the actual contract and requirements

…then the site team will have to rebuild it while the project is already running.

If, on the other hand, it is grounded in the documents and traceable, you can move from tender to a realistic execution plan much faster.

Commercials operationalised

Liquidated damages, thresholds, notice periods, change clauses – they all sit there in the contract.

In most projects, they stay as:

Footnotes in a PDF
A few bullet points in a kick-off deck

Operationalising them means turning them into routines:

How and when notices are sent
How changes are documented and assessed
How you monitor exposure on key LDs and milestones

The knowledge to do this well is built in tendering. Delivery is where you cash it in (or not).

Why we started with tendering – and then added contracts and project support

From day one at Volve, we chose to start with tendering.

Not because we think tenders are more important than delivery, but because:

Tender documents contain the full future contract story in compressed form
Teams are forced to read, interpret and decide quickly
The quality of those decisions has a huge impact later

Once we could read and structure that information properly, the next steps were natural:

Contract review and risk – using the same analysis to understand what you are actually signing up for
Contract management and change – reusing the same contractual spine when variations, claims and disputes show up
Work packs and execution – connecting specs and obligations to how work is actually planned and carried out on site

The information is the same.
The questions, timing and users are different.

What we do at Volve

This gap – between tender documents → bid → contract → delivery – is exactly where we work.

In practical terms, Volve:

Reads tender, contract and project documents as one connected set
Detects requirements, risk drivers, deviations, contradictions and vague wording
Helps structure content by topic, risk, work pack and phase
Keeps a traceable link from every insight back to the original text

In tendering, that means better: