Bid Manager

When you join Kainos, you get to think beyond limitations to make an immediate and positive impact – like transforming digital services for millions of citizens or helping Fortune 500 companies get live and thrive on Workday.

You’ll be part of a people-first culture that is growing around the world. We’re a creative, committed, and diverse group of individuals who succeed as a team.

At Kainos your ideas are heard and valued and you’ll leave a legacy that you can feel proud of.  Join us and discover how our people write our story.

MAIN PURPOSE OF THE ROLE & RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE BUSINESS:
Our vision is to create a world-class business development and marketing capability for Kainos, fuelled by a diverse range of highly talented and motivated professionals working collaboratively and innovatively to ensure we continue our growth trajectory.

We do this via an open and supportive environment where colleagues can share information, learn from one another and excel in their own career. With consistent ways of working aligned to industry best practice, we build sustainable and predictable sales pipelines for our market-leading offerings.

As a Bid Production Manager in Kainos, you will be responsible for supporting the Business Development team with responsibility for a significant area of bid production (e.g. client proposition management, bid team management), ensuring adherence to formal processes, quality reviews, legal review and commercial authorisation. You will manage bid production team members and be responsible for ensuring appropriate allocation of work amongst the team.

You will operate in a sales-focused role, requiring a combination of management, analytical skills, authoring skills, industry knowledge and a detailed understanding of the issues within the delivery process.

You will be accountable for building relevant stakeholder relationships with the business development team, capabilities, account teams, senior delivery staff, commercial teams and customers. You will continually seek innovative ways to improve team productivity, enhancement of collateral and procurement success rates.

JD - Based in Kainos Belfast but required to travel to Kainos London and other Kainos locations whenever appropriate

You will be responsible for:
• Leading a significant area of bid production – planning and managing all aspects of a particular bid production function, co-ordinating team activities and deliverables for clients.
• Providing bid production leadership – building effective customer and commercial relationships, understanding business and market intelligence, developing leads and managing proposal and engagement activities.
• Managing and motivating a team – leading a team effectively, ensuring that all have clear deliverables, work allocations, goals and objectives to deliver high quality work on time.
• Developing and maintaining bid production process – ensuring adherence to the formal procedures.
• Contributing to submission responses – by writing, editing and reviewing submission responses, or sections of bid responses, drawing on contributions as well as collateral.
• Ensuring compliance and commerciality – ensuring all submissions are legally reviewed and has a clear understanding of the contract and commercial terms ensuring Kainos is not compromised by non-compliance. You will also need to be commercially aware by taking responsibility for the completion of commercial models in accordance with agreed commercially reviewed figures.
• Maintaining the bid production portal – including the opportunity register, creation of bid sites, centralising collateral etc.
• Contributing to bid production productivity – owning and driving bid production Improvement Process initiatives.
• Upskilling people - training all new staff involved in bid production activities, as well as educating and sharing knowledge with sales/account teams and customers in relation to bid production area.
• Putting people first & developing others – You’ll manage, coach and develop a small number of staff, with a focus on managing employee performance and assisting in their career development.

MINIMUM (ESSENTIAL) REQUIREMENTS:
• We are looking for someone with a minimum of 10 years’ experience in a relevant commercial environment with broad IT experience and a sound awareness of technology and business trends and their potential impact on future sales opportunities.
• Demonstrated experience in managing parallel bids and customer proposals of significant scale
• Strong commercial awareness and sound understanding of successful sales and bid production dynamics.
• Understands customer’s business drivers and issues and how these can be addressed via Kainos’ solutions.
• Excellent organisational and analytical skills with a keen eye for detail.
• Highly capable of multi-tasking and prioritising tasks with the ability to work under pressure and deliver to regular tight deadlines.
• We all work in teams here in Kainos – a proven ability to manage and motivate team members and lead by example is crucial
• We are passionate about developing people – a demonstrated ability in managing, mentoring and coaching members of your team and wider community is important
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to communicate with a variety of stakeholders.
• A positive attitude to overcoming the commercial, technical and staffing challenges facing Kainos and clients.
• A self-starter who is highly motivated and proactive with respect to personal development
• Highly flexible attitude with the willingness to work away from home base at times
• A person who is affable, credible and enthusiastic who pride themselves on delivering high quality work

DESIRABLE:
• Strong understanding of procurements through Government Frameworks, including Digital Outcomes and Specialists, and G-Cloud.