Hi all,
Brief blog post today about a project bid evaluation heuristic a mentor taught me when I was younger. It's stuck with me throughout my career, and it just came up again, so it's fresh in my mind. Basically, my mentor had two ways of classifying bids. "Pennies quotes" and "zeroes quotes." They might look something like this:
$42,745.75$40,000.00
I'll let you guess which one is the "pennies" and which one is the "zeroes".
The pennies quote was always a positive signal that the bidder knew their costs to a high level of detail, they were charging fair prices, they knew what they were doing, and they were organized to a degree that allowed them to bid that way.
The "zeroes" quote, in contrast, was that the bidder didn't think that hard about it and they just rounded up to make sure they covered their bases. In the example above, the $40,000.00 quote may be cheaper, but it certainly wouldn't be an automatic winner on the bid.
The lesson stuck with me and I supposed I'm old enough now to take a look back at how well it's actually worked. I'd say it's served me well. To provide a more concrete example: When I first moved into my house, we had a fair bit of work to remove old knob and tube electrical wiring. (If you're unfamiliar, its a very old style of wiring and also a fire hazard.) One contractor came though with a clipboard and scrawled a couple notes. Their bid ended in zeros. The other went room my room, counting every single electrical outlet, light switch, and light fixture. They were the one that came back with the penny quote. They were more expensive, but they won the bid. I was confident they knew exactly what they were doing, and we ended up being very happy with their work.
Anyway, I hope you have a new term-of-art now when going through bids. If you've picked up any good rules of thumb over the years, let me know!
Best regards,
Sam Feller
aka THE Awkward Engineer
P.S. More random stories about that mentor, but the machinists I worked with nicknamed him "two tenths," meaning two ten-thousandths of an inch, or .0002", for the level of precision he demanded. To be fair, he was often working on optical systems, which required that caliber of work. Bonus story, I also remember him telling me stories from early in his career, doing work on aligning high explosives within nuclear warheads. Apparently, a common prank was sneaking up on each other with brown paper lunch bags and popping them while their colleagues were busy doing alignments, but I guess the 70's were a different time.