I was so pleased when I found out the theme of this edition as it gives me the chance to have a good old moan about stuff again! Wiki states that a Catch-22 is “a paradoxical situation where an individual cannot escape because of contradictory rules or limitations.” As bidders in the public domain, we are subject to ALL the procurement rules but have absolutely no control over them – to be compliant we must do our best to work them out and then actually sell ourselves within that strict compliance.
I love that challenge. But it seems our government procurers, so very keen on making us play by the rules, wilfully (by design or by stupidity) neglect the rules themselves by providing contradictory instructions throughout the process.
They get SO many things wrong – and it hasn’t got any better in my 25 years in bidding. Typical ridiculosity (and examples):
- Conflicting information littered throughout documents: One place says you can append information, another place says you cannot
- Documents copied from other local authority tenders that are not actually appropriate for what they are procuring: Leaving a requirement to write about managing high-speed roads when there aren’t any high-speed roads in that location
- Contradictory quality restriction instructions: Page counts in the documents read as word counts on the portal or word counts in the instructions are different in the evaluation criteria
- Instructing us to submit our clarification questions via the proper route, but then not dealing with them the proper way: Not answering those questions, or even putting the names of tenderers in responses (not on people, not on)
- Is this an abuse of power or simply because they don’t understand what they are doing? In that case, why aren’t they listening to those of us that put these darn things together?
No matter their ineptness, we must play by the rules if we want them to even open our bids, let alone give us the highest scores. So I suggest:
- Turning, reading, and understanding every page of the documentation – they hide stuff (and yes I know AI can summarise, but how do you know it’s not missing important snippets?)
- Cross-checking submission requirements between the portal and all the documents, before creating a comprehensive compliance matrix
- Asking as many clarifications as is necessary for you to reassure yourselves that your submission will be compliant in line with their rules
- And my final one: Keep fighting the good fight. Let’s talk to government procurement teams so we can tell them what they can do to make the process better for everyone. Ultimately, this means we, as the British public, get better value for money from their services.
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