Scorer
How much will this RFP cost you to answer?
Seven questions that score an opportunity from the responding team's side: how much work the response actually demands, which requirements are driving that, and whether the window is long enough for it.
This is a relative measure for comparing opportunities against one another, not an estimate in hours — hours depend on your team, your archive and how much of it you can reuse.
How the bands were set: from practitioner judgment, not empirical calibration. The current bands have not been calibrated against a document-level dataset linking observable solicitation characteristics to measured response effort. We have not identified a suitable dataset for that purpose. Treat the score as a structured second opinion you can challenge, not as a figure for staffing or resourcing decisions.
Reading the result
Effort and risk are two different questions
Effort is what the document demands. Risk is that effort measured against the days you have and the evidence you already hold — which is why the same tender can be routine for one firm and severe for another. The lever most firms have is the last question: the more of the answer that already exists as approved, current content, the lower every score on this page becomes.
Further reading
- Responding to a formal tender: how scored evaluation actually worksHow formal tenders are scored: eligibility gates, mandatory documents, rated criteria and submission mechanics — and what that means for how you write.
- How to find the right past project for a tender — and prove itA method for locating past projects that match a tender's experience requirement, and for checking you can actually evidence each one before you cite it.