Given the increasing complexity of the government procurement system, Canadian public institutions are under mounting pressure to implement proactive procurement training strategies for their organizations. This article highlights some of the key elements that should be incorporated into those long-term strategies.
As illustrated by multiple recent case studies, Canadian public institutions continue to face challenges in meeting their core institutional governance responsibilities and in developing organizational awareness of fundamental good governance standards. From senior-level officials responsible for institutional oversight and spending approvals to front-line staff responsible for managing specific operational contracts, public institutions need to promote an awareness of the proper roles and responsibilities at all levels of their organizations through each stage of the procurement cycle since accountability gaps and role confusion are major causes of procurement delays and project failures.
Ethics training is an inherent part of that equation, and that training should cover the core topics of conflict of interest, collusion, and bias since public sector contracting is subject to strict probity standards and many public institutions have repeatedly failed to meet those standards in recent years. Those probity standards also require the use of open, fair and neutral competitive bidding procedures for even relatively low-value contract awards. Since public institutions often recruit senior officials, procurement professionals, and program staff from the private sector where open tendering is not the norm, public institutions need to develop proactive strategies to train all staff who are involved in contracting decisions on the rules that regulate open tendering in the government sector.
The public procurement process is also subject to demanding time pressures, which are increasingly at odds with the bottlenecks created during the solicitation drafting process. An institutional training strategy should include advanced training for procurement staff, as well as business areas, on designing and drafting solicitation documents. This training should focus on the necessary skill sets for drafting contract specifications, developing pricing forms, and disclosing bid evaluation criteria since these three areas tend to be the primary causes of drafting delays. Public sector procurement professionals should also be trained on a how to use a broad range of tendering and contracting formats since the project-specific details noted above need to be incorporated into the appropriate tendering and contracting architectures as part of the solicitation drafting process.
A public procurement training program should also focus on applying project management principles to each step of the procurement cycle so that project teams can effectively steer their time-sensitive procurements through the solicitation design and drafting stage, the bid evaluation stage, and the contract award stage of the procurement process.
Public institutions are also required to provide debriefings to unsuccessful bidders. This has become an increasingly complicated area in recent years since legal rulings have simultaneously increased the level of disclosure that public institutions must provide to losing bidders to justify contract award decisions while also protecting the sensitive business information, including pricing information, of all bidders. Striking the right balance in meeting these competing transparency and confidentiality duties in an efficient and defensible manner requires advanced training for procurement staff and for the evaluation team members responsible for maintaining the evaluation records relied on to meet debriefing duties and to defend against any related bid protest challenges.
A procurement training strategy should also include contract management training since procurement contracts, no matter how well drafted, do not manage themselves. Contract managers should be trained on how to maintain proper contract administration records since contractual and administrative remedies for poor performance, including supplier termination and debarments, depend on a proper evidentiary trail. In addition to managing specific individual contracts, public procurement professionals should also be trained on how to properly manage supplier rosters, including master framework agreements and invitational second-stage tendering processes for awarding work to prequalified suppliers, since the use of supplier rosters has been subject to increasingly strict regulation in recent years.
Finally, public institutions need to develop a training plan that focuses on the proper use of negotiated RFPs since flexible solution-based tendering formats are quickly replacing rigid and prescriptive solicitation structures as the primary instrument for awarding complex procurement contracts. That plan should include advanced training on the intricacies of the multi-staged group evaluation processes that are typically used in negotiated RFPs, and on the fundamentals of managing a multidisciplinary team during complex contract award negotiations.
Public institutions can no longer afford to be reactive in their approach to procurement training. Those organizations that adopt proactive long-term training strategies will be better positioned to meet the challenges of an increasingly complex public procurement system in future years.
