Friends that are like family, family that are like friends
Difrent's CEO, Rachel Murphy, talks about turning 40 with friends and family
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At the recent #AgileP event, we discussed the need for a two-way learning journey — involving Digital AND Procurement. Digital Delivery teams shouldn’t be looking at procurement colleagues and expecting them to fully embed themselves without being met half-way.
If the best way to design services is to learn about, empathise with and meet the needs of users; then why don’t we apply the same methodology to transforming how we work with procurement colleagues… it’s a shared journey and codesign will be key.
Whilst I’m by no means a procurement expert, at #AgileP, we discussed creating a guide to the 10 things digital delivery teams needed to know about Procurement; so I thought I’d give it a go:
£1 — £5,000–1 formal offer (i.e. a quote by email)
£5,001 — £25,000–3 formal offers
£25,001 — OJEU Threshold — 3 or more formal proposals (often led by the procurement team)
Full OJEU procurement for Goods and Services:
— £118,133 for Central Government
— £181,302 for Other Contracting Authorities.
The frustrating bit is that by telling the market what we’re doing, we sometimes push the price up but we collaboratively need to find a way to resolve that one!
You need to follow the guidelines in #3 above and ensure potential tenderers are given the same opportunities and access to the same information. Companies involved in the market consultation should not have an advantage over other tenderers.
Add to this that companies are increasingly challenging the outcome of procurements (some for very valid reasons) and you’ll understand a little about the sometimes rigid/risk-averse procurement approach.
Contracts can only be awarded on the basis of either:
Lowest price: The lowest priced tender wins. No other element of the tender may be taken into account; or
The most economically advantageous tender (MEAT): Factors other than or in addition to price, like quality, technical merit and running costs can be taken into account but how you’re judging these needs to be shared with suppliers at the point of inviting responses.
You need to help your procurement business partners by refining your questions and requirements. I’d also advise you to include requirements about the live service management.
me “I want to buy something, can you do that for me?”
procurement “sure, if you write down every aspect of what you want to buy, then we’ll go to market”
me “er… what value do you bring then?”
The #AgileP movement suggests that our procurement colleagues are ready to get their sleeves rolled up and get involved. The flip side of that is that we need to do the same.
Good contracts are written in plain English and are there to protect us if things go wrong — and let’s face it, we can all point to times when things have gone wrong and we’ve wished for a good contract. So we, Digital Delivery folk, need to get reading those contracts and to scenario the stuff that could go wrong so that the contract is useful.
This doesn’t have to be a drainer — think of a procurement show & tell with a 45-minute workshop to scenario plan; kick the tyres on the contract.
The quickest you can undertake a DOS procurement is 6 weeks (Ann Kempster has done in 4 weeks, we love her!) but that’s from the time to market and includes the evaluators allocating time. It breaks down as 2 weeks for the PQQ/100 word stage, evaluate, 2 weeks for ITT stage, evaluate — and that’s quick. more normal is 8 weeks
And that 8 weeks starts when you have stuff issued! Plus DOS is the quickest route to market out there; the others are longer than a full OJEU can take 6 months.
Lastly, I’d advise you to prepare procurement documents early — it’ll take time to get them approved
Difrent's CEO, Rachel Murphy, talks about turning 40 with friends and family
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