Frightened of success

As I've alluded to a few times over the past months, I've been working on a large bid for more than a year. If you take a step back from this process and look at it dispassionately, it's a ridiculous waste of time and money all round. Supposedly designed to ensure that suppliers compete equally for any piece of business, that the business eventually "let" has the best chance of delivering a value-for-money solution, and that the customer's requirements are as fully satisfied as possible, it requires a huge up-front investment of people, and therefore money, from every supplier who decides to bid, and offers no guarantee of success to any of them. But no-one has yet come up with a better way to procure large computing solutions, so this is the process we're stuck with.

When you spend a year working on something, it's inevitable that it begins to mean more to you than it perhaps should. At this stage, it's an ephemeral thing. To an extent you could say it's not real. But in order to give it your best shot, it has to become real in your mind. You have to envisage the completed solution: how the individual requirements (over 3,000 in this case, at the start of the process) will be met; how the individual parts will come together to make the whole thing work; how much effort is involved in each part; and what the different options are for those parts - selecting the best fit for compliance, performance and budget.

You have to be prepared to explain all that, defend it against other ideas, adapt it when a better option is revealed, respond to changes in requirements, changes in budget, changes in timescales, and finally, you have to present it to the customer as the best possible solution on offer. But all the while, it's not yet real. You haven't won the business. And you know that at the end of the evaluation process, you may not win.

Losing is a scary thought. Having invested a year of your life in something, to be told to put it down and walk away - start again on something completely different - is a wrench. It can almost be like a bereavement. But because the solution you've defined is not yet real - at this stage, at its simplest level, it's only a bunch of images in Powerpoint and a representation of your ideas and experience - losing can seem a less scary prospect than winning. Winning would mean having to take that design, those thoughts and ideas, and make it do what you said it would do. For real. To "step up to the plate." To "put your money where your mouth is."

So for the past two weeks, while the customer grinds through the evaluation process to decide which supplier to choose, these thoughts have been circling in my mind. Whether I'd prefer the easy option of losing, and going off to think deep and meaningful thoughts about another piece of ephemera, or the much harder and scarier option of winning, and spending the next two years building something that until now I've only imagined. From a distance, this may seem like a no-brainer. Clearly, winning business is the only way to stay in business and hence has to be preferable. The image of the easy path downwards and the hard rocky path upwards is always with me.

As of 9.30 this morning, thinking about it is a luxury I no longer have. We won the business. The scary, rocky, upward path is before me and on Monday I will take the first steps along it. Without trying to sound pompous or arrogant, in almost 30 years in the computer industry I have never once been asked to do something that I couldn't do. But it's also true to say that many, many times I've been asked to do something that, at the start, I had no clue how I would achieve. So while those previous successes may be taken as an indication of my probability of success this time round, it doesn't stop it being a frightening prospect.