Your bidding function needs to evolve for CFP
Over the next few years, many teams will start losing bids they would have comfortably won in the last five – not because the solution is any less compelling, but because the bidding approach hasn’t kept pace.
Competitive Flexible Procedure (CFP) changes the game we bidders play. Buyers now face a flood of AI‑generated, perfectly compliant proposals they can’t always trust, so they’re looking for new ways to tell suppliers apart. When every bidder can turn out high‑scoring answers at speed, the real differentiation moves elsewhere.
Why does CFP matter?
The CFP is one of the most significant opportunities and threats in public procurement in decades. Introduced in the Procurement Act 2023, it actively encourages contracting authorities to take advantage of the freedom to design competitions that achieve the outcomes they want. CFP can involve multiple stages, iterative submissions, more innovative evaluation situations, with a bias to dialogue. It is also intended to offer rapid and light-touch procurements that lower the barrier to SME entry.
As a bonus, another factor that’s accelerating CFP adoption is generative AI use in proposals, pushing procurement teams down the CFP route even faster so they can differentiate effectively.
For suppliers this move is a mixed blessing; CFP can help SMEs to compete where they couldn’t before, or it can be an opportunity for innovative solutions or cultural/behavioural alignment to have an impact on evaluation. On the darker side, it will expose weaknesses in leadership, governance, capabilities, and internal ways of working… add to that the carnage we’re seeing as organisations attempt to integrate AI tools in their bidding functions, and it’s a painful time to bid for anyone not comfortable with uncertainty.
PAS 360 as a framework
PAS 360:2023, the British Standards Institution’s code of practice for bid and proposal management, was created to improve the maturity and professionalism of bidding functions. It provides the organisational structure needed to operate in dynamic (and potentially chaotic) environments like CFP.
I’ve used the PAS 360 pillars to structure the changes you may need to make to evolve your bidding function to cope with CFP.
Pillar 1: Leadership
What the pillar is: Leadership sets the tone, direction, and strategic intent for bidding. It creates the environment and organisational alignment required for the bid function to succeed. PAS 360 emphasises leadership as a driver of consistency, maturity, and cross‑functional collaboration.
How CFP impacts leadership
CFP demands an organisation that can operate effectively in sustained uncertainty. Standard Open procedures or commercial bidding remains more predictable. Your org probably needs to deal with it all.
CFP replaces linear, predictable competitions with more iterative stages and decision points. Leadership can no longer rely on fixed strategies and stable governance rhythms. Internal corporate and external competitive pressures are pushing for magic results from AI. Change is the new normal.
At a function level, CFP:
- Shifts leadership focus from bid‑by‑bid control to system‑level resilience because you’re not pushing bids through the same sausage factory process. Everything from resource planning to knowledge management will need to think differently.
- Forces tighter, more real‑time alignment between the bidding function and the wider organisation, as strategy, risk and delivery decisions may have to be revisited repeatedly and at least earlier than perhaps they are now.
- Stress-tests the operational model, be it hub & spoke or centralised – weaknesses become more exposed.
What you need to do
To respond effectively, leaders must put some thinking into how the bidding function is led, not just how bids are run. This means:
Make an active decision on go to market strategy. Determine if pursuing CFP opportunities is something the organisational strategy supports given the potential impacts (time, cost, training, process impacts, etc.). Does going after more rapid, transactional procurements make more sense for the organisation now? Are you better placed to win fewer, bigger CFP deals? Make a clear-eyed assessment of intent.
Provide sensible Exec visibility. Establish short exec sponsor steering cycles (‘clinics’) that apply across all CFP bids, aligned to stage and iteration rhythms. Giving oversight across the lifecycle will mitigate the risk of late crises.
Establish proportionate guardrails. Clarify decision authority and escalation paths once, function‑wide and across-functions, so teams are not renegotiating approval rules on every bid. This may mean more complicated guardrails but is needed to keep governance proportionate.
Embrace uncertainty. Actively shape a culture where iteration, challenge and change are recognised as markers of professional bidding, not instability. This will require trust and autonomy, so it’s not for all organisations.
Pillar 2: Governance
What the pillar is: Governance ensures your organisation is pursuing the right bids, managing risks, complying with requirements, and maintaining oversight. PAS 360 positions governance as the backbone of responsible bidding and target operating models.
How CFP impacts governance
CFP disrupts the traditional linear “Gate 0–Gate X” model. Under CFP:
- Qualification can’t be something done at the beginning of the lifecycle and then ignored. pWin can rapidly change direction through the phases in a way it’s less likely to do in a predictable process.
- Gating can’t follow the predictable track with the standard decks and over-delegated authority. Yet is still needs to proportionately deal with ‘normal’ predictable bids. Governance can still be standardised at function level, but needs more intelligent flex in application.
What you need to do
Develop grown up governance. Adapt traditional gates into more modular governance cycles that can be reused across CFP bids but will still flex to other procedures and any commercial bidding you do. This means each bid plan has to intelligently and intentionally decide what governance happens when – this needs maturity and oversight. Guardrails and governance levels need to adapt and flex to be proportionate to the risks involved. Governance packs should be more modular and flexible.
Educate everyone involved. Execs, other function reps, bid teams.
Pillar 3: Practices
What the pillar is: Practices are the repeatable methods used to plan, shape, solution, cost, write, review, and assure bids. They are what make you more efficient and effective from bid to bid. In mature organisations, these are shared, trained, reinforced and continuously improved across the function, not reinvented by each team.
How CFP impacts practices
CFP turns bidding into a modular, iterative process:
- The deliverables the customer asks for can be more than familiar proposal documents and the odd presentation. Now demos, behavioural assessments, video submissions, etc. need their methods, tools and templates developed and matured.
- Quality, deliverability, commercial and evaluation reviews can’t be one-shot or just proposal/price focused. Risk-based decisions are needed.
- Solution development can’t be a one-off activity – at any point more intelligence or client feedback can evolve the client needs and competitive solution. It always should have been a controlled evolution, but CFP exposes bids where it isn’t.
What you need to do
Make a better kitbag. Develop the methods/approaches and supporting tools for the types of deliverables you may be asked for – a modular kitbag that the teams will now need to learn to use and improve.
Develop intelligent bid plans. Even bid schedules will need to be built in a more modular way with added consideration for coherence across deliverables and proportionate quality assurance.
Include cohesion reviews. Make sure the solution, costs, and story are integrated and coherent across all the deliverables. Start early to plan how this will happen for each bid.
Build a culture of SOAPs. Early in the process create a Solution on a Page (SOAP) for each bid that can evolve as needed and also provide the integration/coherence story for the team and the customer.
Pillar 4: Information
What the pillar is: Information includes evidence, insights, data, case studies and lessons learned. PAS 360 treats information as a shared organisational asset, governed and curated for reuse across the bidding function.
How CFP impacts information
CFP demands more information is collected and managed:
- Knowledge management before may have only been chunks of proposal. Now it sits in presentations, demos, dialogue notes, behavioural assessment outputs, and whatever else may be demanded more than once.
- New kinds of lessons need to be learned rapidly at each stage.
- Traditional functional metrics like average bid ROI will be meaningless in the face of the flexibility inherent in CFP.
What you need to do
Evolve your KMS. Find modern technology that can manage all the knowledge you need without creating its own busy-work.
Continuously improve. Embrace agile methods for learning lessons if you haven’t already adopted them. Use tech to gather, analyse and learn across the org. in time to make positive changes to bids.
Redesign metrics that matter now. As part of the strategic thinking in the Leadership pillar, reflect on the metrics that will support the strategy and can actually be effectively measured across different bids.
Pillar 5: Capability
What the pillar is: Capability covers people, skills, capacity, and tools. In PAS 360, capability is a strategic investment decision for the bidding function.
How CFP impacts capability
CFP increases sustained demand for:
- Multi‑skilled practitioners comfortable with rapid pivoting. This may also mean people need to be involved in bids that weren’t before as well.
- Technology that supports iteration, reuse and control at scale.
- Emotional resilience across longer, more dynamic competitions. Any risk of burnout is going to be amplified.
What you need to do
Re-evaluate skills. Take stock of the skills needed to be effective in modern bidding, including soft skills. Update your capability matrices and then re-run training needs analyses.
Train people. You should be doing this already, so update the training for what the function needs now. Think about how you develop resilience in your people.
Determine the capacity model. Build a model for surge capacity rather than relying on ad‑hoc heroics. Work out what this means for resource planning and budgets. If external resource is part of the model then put the contracts/frameworks in place now.
Last word
CFP doesn’t just change how bids are run; it exposes whether the bidding function itself has been deliberately designed to cope with ambiguity, iteration and pace. If you’re going to bid for CFP, then bid like you mean it…