The Monday bid-board review, a year on
A year of running the same Monday ritual. Three changes we made to the review itself after 52 weeks — and one we wish we'd made sooner.
Every Monday at 10am the proposal function has a 30-minute bid-board review. It’s been on the calendar for 52 weeks. The ritual is unchanged; the content is not. Here’s what we changed about the review after a year of running it.
Change 1 — We read the bid-board before the meeting, not in it
The original meeting was: open the board, walk through every live pursuit, discuss. That meant the first ten minutes were people reading. Now the board is shared Sunday evening with a three-line status on each pursuit. Everyone reads asynchronously. The meeting opens with decisions, not information.
The shift compressed the meeting from 45 minutes to 30 without losing ground.
Change 2 — No-bids lead the agenda, not follow
The original order was “new inbound first, then active pursuits, then candidates to decline.” By the time we got to the declines, the meeting was running long and the conversation was compressed. We moved no-bids to the top. The effect is that declining a pursuit gets the same thinking time as committing to one. The bid/no-bid framework post from month one made the case for this — we just hadn’t structured our own Monday agenda to match.
Change 3 — Two review slots per pursuit, not one
Originally every pursuit got one status every Monday. That worked for normal-cadence pursuits. It didn’t work for the 14-day task-order sprints — a single touch on Monday left them with no check-in until Friday, by which point the week had already happened. Now critical-path pursuits get two check-ins: Monday 10am and Wednesday 2pm. The Wednesday slot is 15 minutes, same people, same format.
What we wish we’d done sooner
Named ownership per row. For most of the first year, the bid-board had a “team” column that listed 3–5 names per pursuit. Decisions diffused. An item with five owners has no owner. We moved to a single named lead per pursuit plus contributors. Decisions clarified immediately.
This is an obvious thing in retrospect and a subtle thing when you’re inside it. A shared-ownership column feels like team alignment. It functions as diffusion.
The ritual itself is the same. What changed is that it got shorter, the decisions got cleaner, and the cadence adapted to the pursuits instead of averaging them. See the original Monday standup RFP triage post for the ritual’s version-one writeup.