Traditionally public sector procurement has focused primarily on the assets that are required to support the delivery of services to the community. The Partnerships SA approach focuses primarily on the services to be delivered to the community and not on prescriptive solutions or predefined inputs. An important source of value for money in a public private partnership is to provide the private sector the opportunity to devise innovative solutions or introduce design efficiencies that reduce ongoing operating costs. The public private partnerships approach also requires careful consideration by agencies of likely service needs well into the future, which implies that periodic benchmarking regimes must be included in service specifications to provide a flexible means of expanding, contracting or enhancing service delivery over time.
Project objectives must be defined in precise terms, which nevertheless should be sufficiently broad to accommodate any changes to definitions of service needs, as they may be refined during development of the project.
If the department and the Minister consider that meeting an identified service need has a sufficiently high priority, the next step involves the identification and appraisal of the options available to meet those needs.