Software procurement is a challenging craft. Each discipline (e.g. Social Care, Finance, Education Management etc) requires its own domain knowledge. Vendors are experts in their respective fields, while Council procurement leads have to be able to work across multiple specialisms. The result can be a mismatch.
Our mission is to redress the balance, building a standard protocol for procuring complex software systems which:
- shares intelligence and best practice across Local Government
- provides a knowledge repository which can build over time
- strengthens the customer’s negotiating position
What can go wrong with software procurement?
The list is almost endless! Some common issues are listed here:
- Not enough time. This has to be one of the most common issues – it’s remarkable how often a project which has been in the pipeline for literally years will suddenly loom out of the calendar with a drop-dead date which feels far too soon. An expert advisor can help with some of the really time-consuming tasks, including building a comprehensive Statement of Requirements
- The SoR doesn’t differentiate effectively between good systems and poor ones. To take one example: when every vendor provides a particular piece of functionality, which questions will separate the wheat from the chaff? There can be hundreds of individual areas of functionality in a SoR, each presenting a similar challenge: it can be difficult to differentiate between the best and the worst in a way which is demonstrably fair. The result? Quite often, a poor quality product will score roughly the same as an excellent product. It doesn’t have to be this way. This risk can be mitigated with the help of a domain expert
- Dishonest answers. ‘Dishonesty’ can cover quite a broad spectrum – from the bidder ‘emphasising the positive’ to downright lies. Most commonly, a bidder will tell the truth but will exploit ambiguities – misleading without actually lying. Mitigating this kind of dishonesty takes relentless focus but there are ways of keeping vendors honest. Getting this right is essential – it is rare for a bidder’s dishonesty to meet any legal threshold, so you can find yourself stuck with a poor quality system and little redress
- Components kept out of the bid by the vendor to artificially lower the bid price. This can lead to difficult discussions with the budget holder downstream, since those ‘excluded’ elements will almost certainly be needed – requiring additions to the budget. This applies to implementation services, too – it is remarkable how ‘optimistic’ bidders can be when defining the services needed to implement their system. A domain expert can pre-empt these exclusions and provide proven mechanisms for keeping vendors honest in their responses
- Price and quality evaluation processes out of balance with one another. This is incredibly common, and can result in a poor quality system winning the bid. The challenge, of course, is to mitigate this risk without ending up with a high price. The MEAT formula on its own won’t address this challenge – the quality evaluation needs to offer a wide enough range of values to balance the probable price variations.
- Contract negotiations delaying the project start. This is a relatively straightforward problem to mitigate – as long as the Council’s legal team are on board from the outset
ICT Procurement Ltd has developed practical, pragmatic approaches for each of these issues. Whether you are preparing for a major software procurement, or in the middle of the process, feel free to contact us