...your guide to winning contracts

4 June 2010 - Why don't public sector bodies practice what they preach?

I have been given several abysmal sets of feedback on recent tenders I have been involved with – its not that the tender feedback was that our tender was weak, the problem is the feedback was so general that it did not tell us anything much about how we did, as opposed to how everyone did. So much for tender process transparency.

Most of the time I feel positive about the benefits of bidding for public sector contracts because I know that for many businesses being a public sector supplier provides a profitable income stream, but sometimes the PQQ (pre qualification questionnaire) process makes my blood boil.

I am constantly hearing about how public sector policy is to help more small and medium enterprises win public sector contracts and that they understand the importance of giving tender feedback to unsuccessful bidders and what’s more they see it as good practice to give feedback - Yet do they?

Businesses spend much precious time putting together their PQQs yet the public authorities appear to spend next to no time compiling feedback to help would be suppliers understand their weaknesses. They much prefer to provide general feedback to all bidders rather than specific feedback for each bidder.

How is it of help to a bidder to be told that the reasons for some bidders being unsuccessful included lack of value for money, if they don’t tell you what they consider to be value for money?

Using simple technology such as Outlook Mail Merge tools it is very easy to provide personal feedback to each bidder – all that has to be done is to record bid appraisal scores and comments in a spread sheet and link it up to an email via a mail merge tool and hey presto! - There you have it feedback for each bidder on how their bid was appraised.

It is no wonder that many smaller companies get disillusioned with the tender process when they are left in the dark on how their submission was ranked and where their weaknesses or strengths were.

Of course we know that we can use Freedom of Information legislation to get the full picture out of an authority about their tender process and evaluation but this tends to leave a bad taste in every ones’ mouth – it would be much better if the authorities just practiced what they preach!

Well now that I have got that off my chest I off out to enjoy the sunshine.