I have been promising for a long time to share some of my experience of being a supplier to the public sector instead of a buyer. In four years, I’ve had quite a few experiences, but here is one story that stands out. It’s a bit of a cautionary tale.
An organisation contacted me and invited me, as one of several others, to submit a bid for some governance review work. It was relatively early days in my consultancy experience, and I can’t deny that I was flattered to be asked. The specification that emerged, though, was not very well written and didn’t seem completely clear on what the organisation required – which these days would have started some alarm bells ringing. The person running the procurement process did it all properly and we had an opportunity to ask questions – so, of course, I did, and so did others. The answers to all of our questions on the spec didn’t really make the position any clearer, which should have made my alarm bells ring a bit louder.
The timetable was tight, but we wrote our bid and got it submitted by the deadline, then waited. And waited. The deadline for us to hear the outcome of the procurement came and went. I assumed we had not been successful and expected to get the thanks-but-no-thanks email any day – but still silence. When I eventually got in touch to ask, I was told they were still thinking about it. Other work came along, and the whole thing slipped to the back of my mind until, out of the blue, there was a call to say that the organisation was re-thinking the spec and would Glen Shuraig be interested in submitting a revised bid. When the new spec came through, though, the requirements were different but not any clearer.
If you are thinking that I should have abandoned the whole process at that point, you would be entirely right. Being relatively new, though, I ignored the by now deafening alarm bells and duly reworked the bid to fit the new requirements. This time the buying organisation got in touch with a follow up question about previous experience, which I answered. The long silence was not a surprise. Eventually, I did get a message to say that the organisation was not going ahead with the review and was going to re-think what they needed.
It takes a lot of work to produce a bid. We all understand that this is done at our own risk and that many bids will be unsuccessful. To put all of the potential suppliers through the process twice, however, and award no contract at the end made it all seem pointless. I really hope that the more experienced consultants were too wise to put time and energy into revising their bids for the second round.
I have spent much more of my working life so far on the buyer side than the supplier side. All of the procurement training I recall emphasised that you need to be clear on the objectives and write your specification to meet these (N.B. be clear on objectives, not the process or methodology – but that’s for another day). Writing a good specification is a bit harder for consultancy than it is for paperclips but it’s certainly not impossible. The story above was one of my worst experiences, and fortunately many others have been really positive – some where my bid was successful, some where it was not, but with enough clarity on what was required that the buyer was able to choose a supplier with confidence and get on with the work.
Some of the best experiences were ones where buyers had some informal discussions with potential suppliers before they developed their specification (‘early market engagement’, in the jargon), so that quite a few questions had been addressed before the specification was even issued. I assume that other buyers who produced good specifications without market engagement took time to discuss and clarify the wording within their organisations. I can recall how difficult that could be when I was on the buyer side, with time pressure to get a supplier in place and many other responsibilities, so I completely understand why specifications are sometimes not as well thought out as they could be. But seeing it from the other side, it is even more obvious to me that going out to suppliers without knowing what you want is going to lead to frustration and wasted effort all round.
For anyone wrestling with writing a specification, there is good advice on writing a specification in this Crown Commercial Service Procurement Essentials article on How to write a specification and, of course, you should take advice from a procurement professional. If you want to read more cautionary tales on procurement, have a look at the Bad Buying blog.
