If you are writing a bid on your own, with no other help, then you can probably ignore version control. Once you involve other people in the bid writing process, having good version control becomes important for the following reasons:
- It ensures clear editorial control on all content
- It gives you an audit trail – so you can quickly find missing material
At Silverlock we use a simple version control system. This is its basic format:
- The bid manager nearly always has control of the master version, unless they temporarily pass it to someone else, in which case they are very clear about this.
- When they send a send out a document for comment/ amendments (e.g. to John Smith) they switch the Track Changes feature of Word on and give the document a version number (e.g. vs 1).
- When they get vs 1 back with suggested amendments and comments from John Smith, the bid manager saves this version as vs 1 with JS comments.
- They then go through each of the amendments/ comments and either accept or reject them. Once they have done this for the whole document they save this as vs 2. They then continue working with vs 2.
