Monday, 21 February 2022 – What Do Procurement Officers Do?
[Stage direction: enter the living room of the Parochial House left, Fr Dougal walking animatedly reading from a newspaper] “Ted, you’re never going to believe this! Clint Eastwood has been arrested for a crime he didn’t comm… oh wait, no, it’s a film.”
Dougal is a character trope; the idiot of the ensemble. We laugh at how he never seems to catch on to what is happening (such as that he’s on a plane full of priests about to crash), doesn’t know how to do anything (he can’t conduct a funeral without it ending in a flaming disaster) and doesn’t know how things work (like that bishops don’t fumigate houses). He is generally of no use to anyone (even taking Fr Jack for his daily “walk” to the cliffs without realising that he wasn’t in his wheelchair and, instead, left him on the floor back at the house with his hat and coat on. “I thought the wheelchair felt light today alright.”). He’s credulous (“The Beast… lights up at night and it’s got four ears, two of them are for listening and the other two are kind of back-up ears. Its claws are as big as cups and, for some reason, it’s got a tremendous fear of stamps.”). He’s given ridiculously simple tasks to keep him away from the real jobs (Fr Ted managing the Craggy Island team for the All-Priests 5-a-side Over 75’s Indoor Football Challenge Match: “Dougal, I don’t want you to be physio this year. I want you to [pause] look after the corner flags.” Fr Dougal: “Oh God, Ted, for a second there I thought you were going to give me something completely stupid to do!”) but he still gets overwhelmed (“Corner flag watching is tougher than it looks.”)
Lots of sitcoms
have these characters such as Private Pike, Jack McFarland, Joey Tribbiani, Gob
Bluth, Lt Frank Drebin, Coach Pantusso and subsequently Woody Boyd, Baldrick
and Bubble. They are an exception to the
normal characters and usually looked after by them, shielded from the realities
of what is expected from less disabled people to contribute to the world,
albeit usually with irritation. Cpt
Mainwaring keeps Pike in his platoon despite his annoyance with him. Will and Chandler throw money at Jack and
Joey respectively so they aren’t impeded in their life by their own
uselessness. We laugh at them because
they’re loveable (although Joey’s knee-jerk and laser-like objectification of
women became a bit creepy in later series) and so their gormlessness is begrudgingly
tolerated by everyone else because they are the exception. If more people in the group were as
dysfunctional as them, it wouldn’t be tolerated because nothing would get done
and everything would be on fire or go missing (although, this plotline did work
for Laurel and Hardy). They are usually comic-book
and two-dimensional characters, unrealistic and unlike most people with whom
you work except in rare, humorous and fleeting situations before reality
catches up and they seem to be again banished to somewhere unknown. So why do so many of them work with me at the
council?
Our department has Governance and Procurement Officers. Their job is not so much to procure things, as simple as that might seem to the layman, but is a much more junior role in the process. Their job is to apply the administrative process to any procurement that ensures it is compliant with the council’s governance process for spending public money; that it is:
1. 1. competitive,
2. 2. value-for-money and
3. doesn’t create undue economic divisiveness in our local economy.
The first
objective is achieved by publishing tenders on the council’s online procurement
portal called CapE. If potential
suppliers all know in advance where to find tenders, then it’s an open and,
therefore, fair and competitive bidding process.
The second objective is achieved by the first: direct competition between bidders generates the tension for them to submit the highest quality and lowest price bids in the knowledge that these are the criteria by which they will be assessed and that their competitors will, therefore, be doing the same.
The third is achieved by requiring that social value contributions are offered in the bids of at least 10% of the contract value in addition to the specification for what is being procured. This might include ensuring that local residents and businesses are trained and employed on the contract being awarded to ensure that they are not being excluded from the economic regeneration effects of the c£280 million of their money spent by the local authority each year.
All three of these objectives are statutory requirements for public authorities. It is the law. We must be compliant or face civil claims and Government intervention to our authority to spend public money. Therefore, a governance process is inserted into our administrative procurement process to ensure compliance. And, because the council made the Corporate Procurement team redundant as an austerity measure, dedicated Governance and Procurement Officers are employed in each department instead (which, if anyone can explain the money-saving sense of that to me, please let me know).
And this administrative process is:
1.
1. Describe what it is you want to procure
and set quantifiable criteria of quality, price and social value by which it
will be scored (this is called an “Invitation To Tender (ITT)”,
2.
2. publish ITTs on the portal, CapE,
3.
3. score bids,
4. 4. recommend the award of the highest bidder
in an award report that includes the adjudicated comments on the implications of
compliance from different officers,
5. 5. submit the award report to the
Contracts Assurance Board (CAB) (made up of senior managers) to assess that the
procurement was compliant, and
6. publish the winning bidder
on CapE along with what the council has procured them to do.
It is the
procuring manager who writes the ITT, scores the bids and writes the award
report. Since the Social Value Officer
in my team left because her contract of employment was illegally allowed to
expire yet was expected to carry on working anyway (more on this later), it is now
my new role (in addition to my S106 responsibilities) in my capacity of an
Economic Development officer to write the implications for Social Value
compliance in the award report, and other teams to write the implications for,
say, legal (the Legal team), financial (the Finance team), data security (the
Digital team) and environmental (the Environment team) implications. All that the elaborately-titled Governance
and Procurement Officer contributes to the process is to:
1.
1. post the ITT on CapE,
2.
2. Put the bids in a folder,
3. 3. distribute the award report and the highest scoring bid in this folder to these teams for comments and then
4. publish the award on CapE and council website.
So why do
they struggle with it so much? Why do
they keep getting what is four administrative steps so wrong, generally not
getting the IT to work and constantly running around manically trying to get
things done “asap because of the tight time constraints”? What follows is my email interaction with one
such Governance and Procurement Officer (GPO) for an actual and typical procurement.
Automated email from Sharepoint, 16/2/22:
“Here’s the document that [GPO]: H&F shared with you. Award_Report_BNP v02 ET4” [a link to the award report in Sharepoint on which for me to write my comments on the implications for the social value contribution, not included in this email].
My email to
GPO, 16/2/22:
“Hi [GPO],
"Are you able to send me the [social value contribution proposal] submitted by BNP [the highest-scoring bidder to which the procuring team wants to award the contract]?
"Sorry if I’m being a bit dumb here, but this link below takes me to a Word doc on a web browser which I can’t edit?”
Email reply from GPO copying in my outgoing Economic Development colleague handing over social value responsibilities to me, 17/2/22:
“Hi Paul,
"Please see attached their [social value contribution] submission as requested.
"I’ve attached an offline version of the most recent report, as others are also having the same issue I believe!”
Email reply from my colleague, 18/2/22:
“Hi [GPO],
"Is this the tender where we went back to suppliers and asked to resubmit to 10%? If so, can you pls send us the final scores? If u don’t have them you need to inform [the bids scorer] and ask him to send you the final score pls – we can then provide comments.”
Email reply from GPO to my colleague, 18/2/22:
“That’s right, [sic] I have attached BNP’s updated MS [social value method statements] to this email, [sic] they submitted the revised… stuff [to the bids scorer], so I don’t have vision of that… Would you mind sending that to Paul?
“I have also attached the SV [social value] evaluation for BNP, which was carried out after they had re-submitted their responses [referring to an older version with a non-compliant, less-than-10% offer previously sent to my colleague] (we didn’t hold SV evaluation [sic] until after they submitted their revised responses) [sic] [I don’t understand how this last comment in the brackets is an excuse for why he sent, or belatedly sent, the wrong version of the social value proposal to my colleague.]”
Email from my colleague to GPO, 18/2/22:
“Can you please upload both docs [for the social value proposal] on CapE.”
Email from GPO, 21/2/22:
“Hi Paul,
"Please can I ask for your comments on this report as soon as possible? We want to be able to get it into nest (sic) week’s CAB meeting, so it’s need (sic) to be completed soon”
My reply email, 21/2/22:
“BNP scored 4 but I don’t know what the scores represent. Is 4 a pass (I’m inferring from the comments it is)?
"In the award report you attached, para. 10 says the highest social value commitments are local supply chain spend and hiring a local resident. That’s not what’s in the “Q Evaluation” [the “Q” used by the GPO in the file name to differentiate between two types of evaluation reports; either “Quantitative” or “Qualitative”, he not realising that his abbreviation might be too abbreviated to discern] you sent me. Here it commits to staff time for volunteering and careers advice, office floorspace and car miles saved.
"Am I looking at the wrong reports [that you sent again!] or was this just a paragraph copied and pasted from elsewhere and needs to be changed before I add my comments [hint, hint]?”
GPO’s reply email, 21/2/22:
“That was just an example as part of the template, [sic] that can be changed to whatever they commits [sic] as part of the spreadsheet you have
"A score of 4 is just from 0-5, or 0-100, with a 4 representing an 80. This is following the scoring matrix set out in the ITT.”
My reply email, 21/2/22:
“Ok, that’s great. Do you want to change it from the example to the actual offer and I’ll comment on it?” [He didn’t take my hint.]
GPO’s reply email, 21/2/22:
“Yes, please see the attached in paragraph 10 being amended [sic].”
And this is a typical interaction. Keeping in mind the only role of the GPO is to follow the four steps of what is a purely administrative process, the IT entailed in sharing the reports is a mystery to him, he sends out the wrong bids, uses jargon for which commenting colleagues can’t possibly interpret (and, even then, in reply to my request for clarification on whether “4” is a pass, he gnomically replies that “4” is an “80” which I have chosen, out of sheer exhaustion, to interpret as a “yes”), he has to be told to publish the documents, asks for comments on reports that haven’t been written and just sends out a template (which I had to take the time to read in full and compare it with the bid before questioning why they were different) and THEN HAS THE GALL TO TELL ME HE NEEDS MY COMMENTS ASAP AS IF IT MIGHT BE MY DYSFUNCTION HOLDING UP THIS DOG’S DINNER OF A PROCESS! To make it more irritating, BNP is a letting agency so it’s hard to see what the urgency could possibly be and why a decision can’t be postponed until the following week’s CAB to give our GPO an opportunity de-fuddle his paperwork and mind a little bit and give him a chance to get his corner flags in order, when the offices our commissioned developer is building that we will want to sell won’t be completed until November 2023.
This interaction may seem boring (and it was painful for me), but this is every procurement and every GPO of which there are many. These are well-paid posts with officers ensconced with years of experience. So, how have we managed to collect and retain so many Dougals if their appeal, of what should be a cartoonish character, is that they are the exception? All I can think is that councils must have devised a cartoonish recruitment process that attracts and rewards them.
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