Tender

The word does double duty: an owner issues a tender (the process), and a contractor submits a tender (the offer). The process runs a standard arc — tender documents issued to bidders, a clarification period of formal queries and answers circulated to all, submission by deadline, evaluation, and award — with public procurement adding codified rules at every step and private owners improvising around the same skeleton.

The tender documents are the whole game. Bidders price what the documents say, not what the owner meant; every gap is priced differently by every bidder, and every ambiguity is an evaluation problem now or a claim later. The clarification period exists to drain these before submission, and the quality of the questions received is a preview of the quality of the documents issued.

Failures cluster at the ends. At the front: tender periods too short for the document volume, guaranteeing shallow pricing and post-award discovery. At the back: evaluation that selects the lowest number rather than the lowest realistic number — awarding to a bid whose price is an error or a strategy, then spending the contract finding out which.