Hurry Up and Wait!

I am bidding a WWTP (WasteWater Treatment Plant) in northwest AR that is a fairly large project. The published estimate is somewhere around 30 million. It take a lot of time and effort to put a bid of this size together.

After projects are released for bid, the project can be modified by the engineer through addendum's that he may or may not issue before bid time.

This particular job was to bid on Oct 2nd at 2pm. A few days before the bid date, we received an addendum that pushed the bid date back to Oct 16th, two weeks later. This was somewhat of a relief but not really in that even though you may feel like your not quite ready, you've got the train running full speed ahead and its tough to stop a train.

We shut things down on this job to work on others jobs and then started things back up a week or so later.

Again just a few days before the bid on the 16th we received an addendum that pushed the bid date back a month to Nov 13th. Once again we stopped the train to focus on other projects and work that needed to be done. around the first of November we started back up on the project and started calling everyone of the subs and suppliers again to get new numbers from them.

You guessed it. A few days before the Nov bid date, the project was postponed again for about 30 days. The new bid date was set for Dec 10th.

So at the beginning of this week we started gearing back up for the bid on Dec 10th. The train is running at a pretty good clip and then - screeeeeeeeeech. Hit the brakes!!!! The project has been delayed again until an undetermined date sometime after the first of the year.

This train is taking a lot of abuse. I'm wondering if we need to stop it again if it won't just crash!!!