This guide explains how to break down complex procurement topics into digestible steps, identify and overcome skills gaps, and employ creative techniques to make learning interactive. It also includes an appendix with several resources to help professionals assess their current procurement training materials, and examples of exercises and tools to help measure staff competencies related to key procurement concepts.
Vendor benches, job order contracting, IDIQ contracts, and similar approaches to pre-qualifying vendors can help governments procure goods and services or deliver major projects more effectively. Each of these innovative methods comes with special considerations procurement teams should assess and plan for when using this type of contracting.
In this How-To Guide, you’ll learn what distinguishes solicitations that use pre-qualification from other procurement types, how to determine when you should (or shouldn’t) create a pool of vendors, how to best prequalify vendors, and how to manage these contracts and allocate work fairly among your pool of vendors.
Deciding what to buy and whom to buy it from is a pivotal moment in any procurement. Who is awarded a government contract not only directly impacts how a government is able to deliver services to residents, but it also means that some vendors—and not others—receive an allocation of public resources. For this reason, the decision must also be fair and transparent.
An evaluation scorecard is a tool that helps RFP evaluators and project managers make selection decisions that are unbiased, consistent, and data-driven. This quick read provides examples of evaluation scorecards and shares tips for how to use this tool to standardize your evaluation methodology, reduce evaluator bias, facilitate discussion, and justify evaluation decisions.
Many of the most important functions of state and local government – from building roads to sheltering the unhoused – involve contracting for goods and services supplied by the private sector. Increasing the effectiveness of procurement is therefore a crucial component of improving governments’ overall performance, especially when it comes to fostering better results for residents and addressing inequities in who benefits from contracted services and programs.
This document provides an overview of our framework for procurement excellence and shares examples of how state and local governments have transformed their procurement systems to be more efficient, fair, results-driven, equitable, and strategic. As we walk you through each pillar in our framework, you will see highlighted strategies your government can implement and view examples of how the Government Performance Lab has partnered with cities, counties, and states to implement these strategies and produce transformative results.
The resources contained in this guidebook will help public sector organizations leverage procurement to improve the outcomes of government-funded programs and services, including by writing results-driven requests for proposals (RFPs) and by better managing the RFP development process.
Through the eight modules, department-level program managers, buyers, contract analysts, and other procurement and contracting professionals can walk through the RFP process step by step, from early planning through managing a contract. Each of the modules contains best practices for that specific topic area and examples from other jurisdictions as well as two interactive sub-sections: 1) discussion questions, which you will use as an internal brainstorming tool to generate consensus around the ideas your RFP will communicate, and 2) planning and drafting prompts, which will help you create the written content you will incorporate directly into your RFP draft.
The decision what to buy and who to buy it from is a pivotal moment in any procurement. For public officials, deciding who to contract with for a big, long-term project can feel akin to buying your first new car, committing to a house, or choosing your life partner! The decision of who to contract with also will not only directly impact how a government is able to deliver services to residents, it will also mean that some vendors—and not others—are awarded a government contract and allocated public resources. For this reason, the decision must also be open, fair, and transparent.
This how-to guide will offer suggestions for approaching proposal evaluation as a tool for systematic decision-making. You'll learn how to customize your approach to proposal evaluation along standard dimensions at all stages of the evaluation, while still balancing fairness, consistency, openness, and efficiency.
Government employees often fear that collaborating with prospective vendors or outside stakeholders crosses over a legal line and creates an unfair advantage. However, it is generally acceptable to communicate with potential vendors in a fair and open way before a formal solicitation has been released. Through a Request for Information (RFI), governments can solicit ideas from the vendor community, subject matter experts, and community stakeholders while maintaining a level playing field.
This module will help you gain confidence in using RFIs as a standard market research tool to inform an important procurement, learn how to design and issue RFIs in a simple manner to maximize vendor and community participation, and apply best practice RFI examples from across the country to meet your government's needs.
When the procurement process is efficient, inviting, and inclusive, more firms and organizations will want to participate in contracting opportunities, resulting in greater competition. Positive relationships between vendors and governments during the course of a contract can lead to more collaboration and problem-solving while services are being delivered, which drives better outcomes. One effective tool for understanding vendor perspectives is a vendor survey. Surveys are relatively low-resource and easy-to-administer ways to gather feedback from a large number of vendors.
In this how-to guide, you will understand how hearing from both current and prospective vendors can provide valuable feedback on your procurement process, learn how to design and implement a vendor survey, and read about concrete examples and promising practices in survey implementation across different governments.
Diagnosing bottlenecks in the procurement process, understanding where contract outcomes can be improved, and prioritizing systemic challenges require the kind of clarity provided by data. Procurement data is foundational to running an efficient, effective, proactive, and strategic purchasing office. If you aspire to make the procurement process faster, work with more diverse firms, leverage procurement a a strategic function, or use procurement to advance your government's economic development or social impact goals, you'll want to start tracking and using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
In this how-to guide, you'll learn how to start using data to track the effectiveness of procurement operations and how to discuss these metrics regularly within your purchasing team and how to use them as a tool to elevate challenges and opportunities to your leadership.
It’s tempting to take a “set it and forget it” approach to contract management and assume that because you’ve hired such a qualified vendor, they’ll be able to meet your objectives and complete the full project scope on time and within budget. You may only feel the need to worry about compliance activities, such as paying invoices or checking that insurance certificates are valid.
But seeking continuous improvement through contract management is crucial to realizing the outcomes you set forth in your solicitation. Without strong contract management practices, you could see incomplete or unsatisfactory service, missed deadlines, unfulfilled deliverables, and unspent sums. This how-to guide will help you match your contract management approach to the appropriate intensity for a specific contract. You'll learn new ways of working collaboratively with your vendors, understand strategies for shifting your contract management approach from compliance-oriented to one centered on improved performance, and build your toolbox of management strategies for successful performance.
Governments across the country are committed to investing in racial equity, but many are struggling to translate that commitment into tangible outcomes for communities of color. This how-to guide highlights innovative procurement strategies that can help governments increase investments in historically marginalized communities and deliver services more equitably.
Governments spend anywhere from a third to half of their budgets on contracted services, and those services often have a direct effect on residents’ daily lives. From the school buses that pick up children in the morning, to the roads on which those buses travel, and the meals served in school cafeterias, procurement decisions touch the lives of residents every day. Governments that acknowledge the consequential and important role of procurement – as a strategic tool for directing resources and services to historically marginalized communities – can close the distance between their equity goals and the outcomes experienced by their residents.
Governments rely on vendors to provide goods and services to residents every day, yet many do not have mechanisms in place to formally track the performance of these vendors. Without an understanding of how vendors are doing, governments are limited in their ability to improve performance or to make well-informed decisions about hiring a vendor in the future or renewing a contract.
Setting up a vendor performance evaluation system can enable governments to track important data about vendors' performance over time and to support vendors in improving how they deliver goods or services. Such a system can help influence decisions on which vendors your government chooses to contract with based on previous experiences and facilitate better and more transparent information-sharing across departments and with peer governments. This how-to guide will help you get started in setting up a vendor performance evaluation system in your government.