The 10 rules of painless procurement - from both side

A few weeks ago I picked up on a tweet about the tender process from @kevinmulryne and added a few comments along with @innerquest

As we had all been involved in the procurement process (from both sides) we decided to come up with a few tips on how to manage the process - if you are looking to submit a tender or if you are looking for a supplier.

We used a shared google doc to come up with several ideas, tips, experiences and these are our top 10 for both! I hope that you find it useful.

by Scott Hewitt, Tim McShane and Kevin Mulryne

scott.hewitt@realprojects.co.uk

kevin@mulryne.com

tim@fluffyclouds.co.uk

I’ve have just finished reading a book at the British Cycling team and their meteoric rise over the past 10 years. As a keen cyclist the book provides a number of insights into how the team operated. There is one section in particular that raised a number of questions.

Sir Chris Hoy started to compete in an event called the Keirin several years ago when the Kilo event was removed from the Olympics. For those of you who have caught a bit of track cycling on the TV it’s the one where they all ride behind a motorbike at increasingly high speeds. The cycling aficionados amongst you will know that Keirin originates from Japan and is remains hugely popular. Kieran riders earn vast sums and enjoy celebrity status due to the massive amounts that are bet on the outcome of races. Increasingly overseas riders saw the money on offer and wanted to compete in Japan, to date without a great deal of success. Before any overseas rider can compete in a Japanese event they have to undertake a rigorous 2 week training camp, where one of the tasks involves taking a bike to pieces without dropping a tool and re-assembling it in a set order.

At the end of the 2 week course there is a test. Pass the test and you can ride in events, fail and you can’t. Simple.

It was the test aspect of the course that interested me the most. One of the cyclists commented on the monotony of the course and the sheer basic nature of the course content…but…he remained ‘switched on’ at all times as if you didn’t pass the test you couldn’t ride. The rider attended all of the sessions, took everything on board, put up with the monotony to ensure that he was ready for the test. He took the test, passed and rode in events.

Reading this particular chapter really made me think of all the courses where the qualification is vital to future success and progress but the learning experience is often disappointing for those involved. I’ve spoken to my friends who have attended courses that have not been challenging and focused purely on getting the badge. I’ve also got my own experience to share. Over 5 years ago I took my PRINCE 2 exams; the first 2 days pretty much consisted of highlighting pages from the course book. I was somewhat disillusioned by this and in the revision periods at the end of the day I actually tried to gain a deeper understanding of what the course was about. It was only at the first multiple choice exam that I realised what I was being prepared for. Each of the sections I had highlighted had been linked to potential answers in the multiple choice exam. Once this was passed the whole teaching style changed as we approached an open book written exam. I’d not thought about this course until after I’d finished reading the Keirin chapter and it all came back to me!

Over the past few weeks I’ve answered questions about e-learning strategies. I have been involved in the creation of e-learning strategy documents and projects for the public and private sector in the UK and thought that I would share a few of my thoughts.

This isnt’ an exhaustive list but it will provide you with a starting point. I would ensure that any strategy focuses on a number of key areas, these are going to be specific to your organisation but you may want to think about the following:

Participation
Who are the affected parties? What additional training provision will you need to put in place during the project lifecycle? Who are your stakeholders (internal and external)

Technical Issues
What is the current IT platform? How will your e-learning strategy integrate with future IT changes and developments? You need to think about how these are aligned

Content creation and acquisition
Where are you going to get content from? Are you going to develop it internally? What will your quality standards be? You need to think about the creation of e-learning guidelines so that you can control the output.

Feedback systems
How will you measure performance? How will cost of ownership and return on investment be measured? What are the projected costs? How will effectiveness of the learning be measured?

Costs
How will ROI be measured, how will you work with the cost centres within the business

Limitations
Think of the issues that you might have and get these highlighted early

Types of learner
Several things to think about: IT literacy levels, mobile learning, expectations of e-learning

Business Improvement
Where will this be? Cost, Improvement in access to training material, process efficiency?

There are obviously many other things to consider, some of which will be specific to your organisation but but hopefully this will give you  a starting point.

I’ve been on the road quite a bit recently and I’ve bumped into a number of friends and colleagues. IT was nice to get comments that people actually do read the blog!

Hello to all of our readers….I’m not sure quite how many readers we have!

At learning technologies I saw Clive Shepherd deliver his seminar on e-learning in a downturn. He mentioned blogging and how you needed to be prepared to contribute to the blog regularly, how right he is! I’d like to blog a bit more than I do but it is quite tricky to do this every day, although I’m going to try to make a few more blog entries than last year.

This month I’m making the final touches to the first norfolk e-learning forum event of the year and we are working on a number of projects in the public sector. I’ve also taken some time to write a series of short articles about project management which we might upload to the website.

Thank you for taking the time to read the blog, I hope that there is something interesting from time to time…

oh….I bought a PSP at the weekend so we planning to do some R&D as well as road testing an acer aspire one. My first acer aspire only lasted a week before the screen blew!

A few days I logged into my Basecamp account to be greeted by a new page…bascially they are stopping support for IE6! Ok, so more and more people are on IE7, Safari, Firefox with Chrome coming soon but I was still surprised.

I had read a few articles recently where users had come across websites which no longer supported IE6. Ill still be able to view Basecamp via another browser but it got me thinking about a lot of our customers. Many of the organisations we work with still use IE 6, if they are in big companies IT roll-outs can take time.

I understand why people aren’t continuing to support IE6…I have it on my machine as I’m the company IE 6 tester…but it did get me thinking about how websites could fail to be supported on a browser in a matter of months. Could we reach a situtation where developers are coding sites for specific versions of browsers with the user selecting their browser before they enter the website? I’ll be watching what happens with code standards and the increasing number of browsers coming online.

so you agreed the spec, got the contracts right, got the team in place and then you’ve started work. Everything is going well but you know that you have the first review coming up. How do you manage the process? What is going to be documented? How will you make sure everything is done?

We’ve started using a really simple excel sheet for logging all change and test requests. Each entry gets a unique ID and we record:

The problem, the requested change, browser type, operating system, wider impact of the change, who requested it, screen grab (with a reference),who did the work (in our office), any url or reference and any additional notes.

We’ve found this to be really useful when we manage changes. Giving everything a unique ID and sharing the sheet across the development team means that we can track a change and also have something to refer to. Instead of saying has the menu been changed we can ask about 1.1-12. It might seem a bit long winded, especially when you start but if you’ve got lots of requests to manage it is really helpful.

Scott

Before we made the move to Basecamp we did do some thinking about the tools and features that we needed. We looked at a several tools and decided that we wanted to have the following functionality:

1: web based so that our clients could use it without having to buy and install software

2: email notifications so that the system could deal with some of more the basic notifications

3: secure, safe and reliable service - managed by someone else if possible

4: store files so that clients can download them

5: ability to store multiple projects and multiple clients

After a review of several tools we went for basecamp. As an elearning company we were also impressed with the online instructional videos. These saved a great deal of time when training staff and our clients. There is still a challenge in getting everyone to look at the project plan but the easy layout and email notifications makes it a lot easier to encourage use across the project team.

It has been about 6 months since we started to use Basecamp. After years using Project and creating massive Gantt charts that were:

Hardly ever read

Rarely updated

Over about 20 pages when printed

We made the decision to use Basecamp. It doesn’t have all the features of project but we’ve found the functionality elements of emailing, file uploads and chat more than make up for some of its limitations. We’ve foudn our own way of using it and it is working well for our clients who can get an instant update and get email notifications.

I’ll still revert to project when there is a ‘big’ project to plan with lots of depedencies and critical path as Basecamp doesn’t allow this at the moment but basecamp is proving popular.

The real winner for me was the instructional videos. I think that they are excellent, we’ve used them in our project manager training and they have also saved loads of time when we’ve brought the client into Basecamp. As they are always available you can revert to them at anytime. Chatting in the office we can’t recall a piece of software that was so simple to use but delivered so much in terms of efficiency and business improvement.

I’ll always have project on my machine but it is basecamp that I’m using day to day.