Applying the New Paradigm for Procurement

Councils are grappling with how to assist their communities, cities, districts and regions to recover from the effects of COVID19.  Central and local Government spend is a critical part of the recovery.  It is critical that councils:

• do the right things - projects that have the greatest positive impact on their communities, drive value into the community and optimise council spend
• do them the right way – right strategy, right process – easy and quick
• do them within the rules – meet probity and governance requirements.

We see a lot of procurement that is fundamentally flawed and poor decisions are made, with the wrong suppliers winning the business and then the flow on problems that follow.  Procurement and contract management can be easy, fast and effective if you know what you are doing, or really bad if you don’t.

In 2014 out of frustration with poor public sector procurement we developed a New Paradigm for Procurement:

• collaborative
• courteous
• considerate.

We have applied this paradigm to develop strategies, the new models and techniques to tackle these issues successfully for quite small projects right through to reasonably large infrastructure projects and large maintenance contracts. 

We were just about to send these out to our clients when The Office of the Auditor General (OAG) released an article on Local Government Procurement (25 May 2020) - click here to read the article. 

This article raised a number of common and valid issues.  The strategies that we had developed fitted hand in glove as solutions to these issues.  Click here to get our viewpoint.