This article is an excerpt from The Art of Tendering: A Global Due Diligence Guide.
Figure 22 – Due Diligence Indicators
Organized across eight target areas and covering 24 due diligence indicators, the following standards can serve as benchmarks for assessing the procurement practices of your organization:
I. Institutional Governance
1. Accountability Controls
Does your organization have the proper internal governance policies and procedures in place to keep pace with emerging due diligence standards?
2. Integrity Indicators
Does your organization have the necessary safeguards in place to address procedural improprieties, including unfair advantage, conflict of interest and evaluation bias, and to protect against bid-rigging and collusion?
3. Open Competition Requirements
Does your organization have the appropriate policies and procedures in place to comply with its open competition obligations and avoid procurement challenges based on inappropriate sole sourcing, improper local preferences and biased specifications? Has your organization established open framework agreements to consolidate its purchasing while facilitating open competition?
II. Project Governance
4. Project Planning and Procedures
Does your organization’s planning and approval process avoid approval bottlenecks and effectively integrate key decision-makers and subject matter experts into the early stages of project planning?
5. Project Team Roles and Responsibilities
Does your organization’s project governance process require the clear documentation of roles and responsibilities in order to avoid role overlaps and accountability gaps?
6. Clear Requirements and Formats
Do your organization’s project planning protocols mandate the preparation of clear requirements, realistic costing and scheduling estimates, and the selection of appropriate contracting structures and tendering formats?
III. Forms and Formats
7. Range of Formats
Does your organization use a broad range of tendering formats based on domestic and international standards?
8. Template Content
Do your organization’s standard template terms comply with the expanding body of standards flowing out of treaties, statutes, directives, good governance guidelines, and case law developments?
9. Awareness of Format Use
Does your organization have a clear understanding of the legal and practical implications of using different tendering formats?
IV. Document Drafting
10. Drafting Process Flow
Does your organization have a clearly defined document drafting process that avoids duplication and delay and enables accelerated drafting?
11. Drafting Roles and Responsibilities
Does your organization have clearly identified roles and responsibilities for the drafting and assembly of its solicitation documents?
12. Document Readability
Does your organization ensure better readability by using plain language in the main body of its tendering documents and properly incorporating technical content within appendices and schedules?
V. Bidding Risks
13. Contract Scoping
Does your organization ensure that its solicitations are designed with clearly drafted requirements, properly aligned pricing and scoring structures, and well-tailored legal agreements?
14. Material Disclosures
Does your organization have the appropriate material disclosure protocols built into its drafting and tendering processes?
15. Evaluation Defensibility
Are your organization’s evaluations based on clear compliance standards, transparent scoring mechanisms, and defensible award processes?
VI. Contract Management
16. Contract Administration
Does your organization have a proactive and clearly defined accountability structure for the contract administration stage of the procurement process?
17. Scope Management
Does your organization have proper scope-management practices to protect against improper scope increases?
18. Performance Tracking and Debarment
Does your organization have the performance tracking measures in place to deal with problematic contractors and properly bar them from future work?
VII. Training
19. Hiring Standards
Are your procurement hiring and retention practices properly targeted to the knowledge, skills, and experience required to meet current procurement due diligence standards?
20. Procurement Training
Are your core procurement and legal staff receiving the up-to-date training necessary to ensure that your institution is keeping pace with industry developments and meeting its due diligence duties?
21. Advanced Negotiation Training
Do your core procurement staff have the advanced negotiation training required to properly manage more complex procurement projects?
VIII. Innovation
22. Broader Organizational Awareness
Is your organization proactively promoting a broader organizational awareness of proper procurement practices?
23. Business Process Improvement
Is your organization implementing procurement-centric business process improvement that embeds strategic design planning and project management disciplines into the planning and execution of its procurements?
24. Effective Use of Technology
Is your organization keeping up with industry practices and leveraging procurement-centric technological innovations that can enhance and accelerate its tendering cycles?
