into the night

RFP tenders - don't you just hate 'em? Above you see the Wieden + Kennedy shopfloor at 4.00am when not a creature should be stirring. But, what's this? There are still some people toiling at their workstations instead of tucked up at home in bed.

Frere...

..and Ollie.

This is because we're preparing one of those giant tender documents for a big RFP (request for proposals) for a new business opportunity. These things are brain-freezing monsters that require huge amounts of work to be completed against a nightmare deadline. You need to compile case histories on everything you've ever done in the world ever and supply the inside leg measurement of everyone who's ever worked for the company.

You end up with a book the size of the Bible, but possibly somewhat less profound. And by this time in the morning the quality control may be suffering.

Trying to get people from other offices round the world to help you pull the information together is never easy as they all have work to do creating brilliance for our existing clients. And if you don't manage to accomplish the allotted labours in the required time, and deliver - as stipulated - your 37 hard copies printed on vellum and bound in pigskin to Megacorp HQ in Ulan Bator by 1.00pm Tuesday then your submission may be considered ineligible.

Crisis point was at around 1.00am when we realised that it wasn't going to be possible in the time available to get it all the many, many pages made beautiful in Quark by Ollie's Mac wizardry. We were going to have to keep it in Powerpoint and make the best of it. There was a brief interlude of exhausted weeping but we're past that now.

There may still be much Powerpoint to go before we sleep.

Comments

[Val]

i hate these nightmare deadlines! me an my creative partner were working on a student award brief last evening – it had to be done this morning.
at 10pm we got an email saying, deadline delayed for two weeks 'caus of popular demand, yay!

hope, you are not still working right now & wish u a day off after ur done!

[Christos]

KEEP UP... you are natural born
winners up there!

[Jeremy]

I sympathise. We once had a major tender response disqualified by Scottish Enterprise (LEC in Scotland) because the "electronic copy" that they'd requested had been emailed rather than posted.

When I argued that (1) email was the obvious choice for PDFs, and (2) no specific medium for electronic copy was mentioned (e.g. CD), they said that any medium at all would have been fine. Memory stick? "Yes." DAT? "Yes." Punched cards? "Um, yes."

Public sector and very proud of it obviously.

[neil]

And I remember at a previous agency spending many hours completing a giant tender for the Royal Mail. Rather than contacting us to let us know we hadn't been selected they released the shortlist direct to the press. Which is nice. It took a while for them to contact us with the reason we hadn't been selected. (Maybe the letter got lost in the post.) When they finally did get in touch, the reason given was that the business would have represented too great a proportion of the agency's billings. Of course, if they had declared this as a criterion for disqualification in the original RFP document they could have saved us, and no doubt many other agencies, a lot of time and trouble.