Bidding on government contracts is a convoluted process at best.

There are three mechanism the GoC (Government of Canada) uses for contracts:  MERX, PS Online, and TBIPS.  We only bid on TBIPS contracts.

When a TBIPS RFP (Request for Proposal) goes out it will be for one or more positions.  For each position, there will be a grid for mandatory and rated requirements.  Each rated requirement will detail how a score is determined.

When putting in a bid for a position, we need to fill in a grid showing how each consultant bid meets each of those requirements along with a resume for each consultant, and a bill rate.

When the bid is evaluated, the contract will be awarded to the bid that has the highest score per dollar.  This is all part of the GoCs effort to make the awarding of contracts transparent, fair, impartial, and competitive.

In our next blog post we’ll discuss how to fill out gids.

The post after that will discuss ways that the GoCs contracting process falls apart in its attempt to be transparent, fair, impartial, and competitive.